The Tufts Community Union Senate held its reelections for the fall semester this past weekend, with voting running from April 9 to April 11. A total of 904 students, or 13.1% of the student body, voted in the election, similar to the fall semester, which saw a participation rate of 13%.
Both the current Class of 2027 and Class of 2029 senators ran unopposed for reelection, while the Class of 2028 saw six incumbents and only two challengers. There are seven seats per class.
Each TCU Senate position has one available seat, all of which incumbents ran uncontested except for the Women’s Senator and Africana Senator positions.
Sophomore Elysse Cumberland challenged current Africana Senator, sophomore Jesse Kitumba. Current Women’s Senator Anahat Bawa, a sophomore, did not run for reelection; instead, Gracie Fenselthan, a current Class of 2028 senator and member of the Allocations Board, ran uncontested for the seat. Lugin Afini, a junior, also ran for Southwest Asia North Africa Community Senator to fill a vacant seat.
TCU Elections Commission Chair Theo Jacobsen, a sophomore, told the Daily that this was not an uncommon occurrence in Senate reelections and that he does not see it as strictly negative.
“I’d be happy to run a contested election if people want to apply and run against them; I want to encourage that,” Jacobsen said. “But … I don’t necessarily see there to be a need for that every election. If the best seven candidates are the people who are already doing the job, I'm okay with that.”
TCU Vice President Alexander Vang, a senior who has spent three years as a member of the Senate, echoed Jacobson's sentiment.
“I would say a spot or a seat being uncontested is pretty normal, but I also wouldn’t say that it’s a negative thing,” Vang said.
Class of 2029 Senator Michael Williamson suggested multiple reasons for the lack of competition, one being insufficient advertising by the Elections Commission.
“I think that [ECOM] did not do a great job advertising these elections,” Williamson said. “A lot of that is because it really is hard to gain traction and get students to go out of their way to click a link and to fill out a survey.”
Williamson said that much of the responsibility to promote Senate elections should fall on ECOM, rather than individual candidates.
“It should not be put purely on the candidates to ensure that students are voting. … [This] is what the people in the Elections Commission are literally given stipends to do,” he said.
Vang added that ECOM may be considering changes in how elections are publicized.
“I think in terms of outreach, that definitely falls more on ECOM,” Vang said. “[They] may or may not have changes in store for trying to publicize reelection.”
Williamson also noted that a lack of competition may reduce campaign engagement among incumbents.
“I’m not one to particularly back down to competition, so I would have enjoyed having the opportunity to run a more interesting campaign than what I did,” he said. “There was a clear lack of motivation from almost everyone who was uncontested to go out of their way to do tabling events or even just smaller things.”
Jacobsen expressed uncertainty as to why so many current senators ran uncontested, though he suggested that it stemmed from general satisfaction with the Senate’s current work.
“I do think the Senate’s done a great job,” he said. “People are seeing cool projects being done, they’re seeing the Tufts Dining survey. That was a really interesting project.”
Vang also added that fall elections for the first-year class generally see more candidates than in later election cycles.
“We tend to see in the [first-year] class, in the fall elections, a lot of people running just because that’s what they’ve done in high school — they want to continue being a student leader in this capacity,” he said. “And then I think what happens is they just find their own interests if they’re not elected, which is completely fine.”
Vang also said that previous candidates get the chance during the year to see what the Senate really does and therefore have a better idea of whether the role fits their goals.
“They’ll see what senators actually do, [and say], ‘oh, wait, that might not align with what I want to do, what I initially thought,’” he said.
“The senators that return know what they’re interested in doing on Senate. … We … continue to get new people, new faces every single year, whether that be through community senator seats or class senator seats.”
Although low competition is not a new phenomenon for spring elections, Vang suggested ways to attract new candidates, such as more broadly advertising what the Senate does.
“We can try to bolster what we do on Senate — which I feel like we’ve done really great this year — but we also can’t control who decides to run and who [doesn’t].”
