Like a regular Government, Saint Leo University’s Student Government Union (SGU) is used to maintain order and organize school events and functions. The elections were held on Feb. 23 in which all of the candidates competed for one of the five positions of the SGU board.
The sole purpose of the SGU is to, “To serve as a voice of the student body,” said Edson O’Neale, director for student activities whom is also the advisor for SGU.
SGU uses the opinions of the students and tries to work towards improving the institution. In this election, there were fifteen candidates that applied for the job. The applications were then reviewed and were given the go ahead to run for one of the five positions on the board.
O’Neale said that this is the, “Highest amount in recent years that have applied.”
Surprisingly, as one of the top leadership roles, only a few persons applied for this job over the years.
O’Neale hinted that, “Persons who might have wanted to apply had a lack of confidence or simply because they knew they weren’t as active in school as they ought to be.”
Each student was given a personal username and password to vote for his/her candidates. In some instances, individuals did not receive their personal username and password to vote. This was probably due to “late registrations,” according to O’Neale. When that happened students simply needed to email O’Neale so he could create and send them their personal username and password. With a username and password, students could then vote once. This is policy change from previous years when students used their student name and ID to vote, which allowed for tampering with the election and resulted in the accused being expelled.
The results of the winners of the elections were sent via email the following day in the afternoon. The installation of the board will be on Apr. 15.
