As of Jan. 25, nominations for the upcoming Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) elections have begun, unleashing potential candidates and their clipboards on the student body.
Many interested students have already begun shadowing the Atrium in order to fill their minimum required student signatures for the Jan. 29 deadline, to be considered a candidate and be able to campaign next week.
Those seeking executive positions will have to obtain 100 signatures, while any students seeking a referendum on a specific question must obtain 1,000 signatures in favour of their issue.
Individual councillor nominees must obtain twice as many signatures as the number of seats that faculty holds on the council.
There are regulations that strictly govern the nomination process. While collecting signatures, students are not allowed to actively campaign — “defined as the process of distributing, advertising, exhibiting, presenting, broadcasting, soliciting, or making any sign or gesture so as to exhort or convince any member of the Association to support” them, according to Consolidated Electoral Code Section 12.1.
Official campaigning is restricted to Feb. 3-9, not including the weekend, once the nominees have been officially recorded and put on the ballot.
“It’s important that everyone starts on the same level,” said Sagal Osman, CUSA’s Chief Electoral Officer. “Campaigning gets heated and people get affected emotionally, so we restrict it to those five days.”
But this regulation leads many potential nominees wondering how to obtain signatures when they cannot express their ideologies or platforms.
“It’s hard because I’ll ask someone to sign my nomination sheet, but when they ask me why, I can’t say anything,” said second-year journalism student Rob Nettleton.
According to Osman, rules regarding early campaigning are strict and taken very seriously at the electoral office. There have already been two instances of early campaigning, and both groups have been officially warned of the violation.
One group of councillors seeking nominations were seen taking what would be campaign pictures of themselves in the atrium and “making it seem as though they were running on a slate together,” which potential councillors are not allowed to do, according to Osman.
Another group were reprimanded for a Facebook group they had started in November entitled “Carleton Students Against the Mandatory UPass,” as it constitutes a possible referendum question at the upcoming election and thus early campaigning.
“It had been up for months, and it was never intended to be campaign material,” said Ryan Seangio, one of the group’s creators. “But since it directly mentioned Carleton and CUSA we had to take it down and replace it with another group that didn’t mention either.”
“We take this very seriously. It is five days and we hold it to that. Campaigning takes a lot of time and we go to university, school comes first,” Osman said.
As the campaign period draws to a close, students are expected to see a variety of posters and online groups emerge, as well as a debate on Feb. 8 in the Atrium, before the final voting dates on the 10 and 11.