The Wilfrid Laurier University Students’ Union has made three main changes to their elections policies this year. The most significant is that the School of Business Students’ Society (SBESS) will be holding their elections for next year’s admin at the same time as WLUSU.
“They’re the only ones we had time to do,” said Saad Aslam, chair of the WLUSU board of directors.
“Hopefully next year we can get all four [student groups] to run their elections with ours.”
There will only be voting for SBESS at the business polling stations.
Aslam noted that although this wasn’t one of his original plans as chair, it was something WLUSU had been talking about as an organization.
“[SBESS] took the initiative to run all the supplementary training for the candidates; they’re going to run their own open forum. All we’re doing for them is providing the ballots and we’re
going to count them,” said Aslam.
Another change to the policies includes an updated list of what campaign support WLUSU employees can offer. “We added the associate and vice-presidents as well as director of orientation programming and events at Brantford,” said Aslam.
These three people cannot campaign on a team for a candidate, be agents or scrutineers.
The final change was to the reimbursement policy for campaign teams. The full amount of money spent during the campaign teams will now be reimbursed, opposed to the previous figure of only 80 per cent.
“It’s something that was floated around last year, and it wasn’t accepted. But I think enough people supported it to bring it back to the board this year,” said Aslam.
“My goal was to open up the doors and get as many people involved as we can. I know personally, having to front like $125 you may not get back is a big financial barrier.”
