Just six percent of UW-Madison students turned out to vote in the Associated Students of Madison elections this spring, down from nine percent in last spring’s general election and the lowest turnout in 10 years.
“We’re always looking for new ways that we can reach our demographic, especially on a college campus where [there] can be a lot of noise,” said Kate Wehrman, Student Elections Commision Chair. “We were looking into boosting our social media posts, engaging more on our platforms like Twitter.”
The Student Elections Commission, which is responsible for marketing elections and monitoring for campaign violations, worked hard the past few semesters to boost voter turnout through updated marketing materials.
“We’ve experimented in the past, last year we had a Snapchat filter, so we’re just trying to engage with our student body more,” Wehrman said.
Fewer candidates in the running this election cycle as well as a lack of referenda on segregated fee usage may have contributed to the low turnout, according to Wehrman.
In the College of Letters and Science, which has twelve representatives total, Kaiyang Chen once won the most votes for a second year in a row, beating current Vice Chair Billy Welsh for the top spot by 89 votes.
Every student running in the Professional Student’s category earned two votes, and all were write in candidates.
Current representatives Jeremy Swanson and Yogev Ben-Yitschak beat incumbent Jordan Pasbrig in the race for School of Business representatives.
Swanson will also continue to serve on the Student Services Finance Committee, alongside freshman Mianzhi Huang and newly elected representatives Eric Schumacher and Alexandra (Zeying) Qi.
“I’m really excited to continue serving on the committee, I think we’ve had a really successful 24th session,” Swanson said. “We’ve been able to do a lot of great work over this past year and so I’m really excited to continue that throughout the 25th session and keep that ball rolling moving forward.”
