RORY MACLEAN
News Writer

The Arts and Science Students’ Union must hold a second by-election for a representative on University Students’ Council after council overwhelmingly rejected the legitimacy of the last election.

The University of Saskatchewan Students’ Union executive was made aware of complaints that neither the call for nominations of candidates nor the election itself was adequately advertised.

“There was a lack of transparency all around,” said Scott Hitchings, USSU vice-president operations and finance. “Not many people were informed that there was a call for nominations and even less were informed that there was an actual election going on.”

In council, USSU president Warren Kirkland complained that nominations were only advertised at one location in the entire college, on the window of the ASSU office on the second floor of the Arts and Science building.

Katie Salmers, ASSU president, disagrees.

“It wasn’t just one on the window of the office,” she said. Salmers says that there were several ads around the second floor of the building. “But, there was limited advertising, I will acknowledge that.

“The only problem with arts is that there are so many posters that go up per week that if we even post a notice it’s usually either covered or taken down or moved and we have to keep up with that, and that’s something we’re working on.”

Salmers contends the election she organized was, in fact, fair and open. She says she held out this long on holding the election to make sure she had enough candidates for a competitive race. After an initial call for nominations was fruitless, Salmers said she turned to “personal connections,” approaching people in all her political studies classes to see if they would be interested in the position.

After lining up five candidates for the race, four dropped out at the candidate meeting one week before the election, leaving only Christopher Thresher, said Salmers.

Having an election with only one candidate — who wins on the basis of a confidence vote — does not go against the student union’s bylaws. Salmers, along with the entire USSU executive were all elected in that fashion. But the USSU executive feels the whole process was not public enough.

“I don’t think it matters how many people run,” said Kirkland. “But if students don’t know that the opportunity to run is there, that they don’t even know it’s going on, well, that’s not really an election at all.”

Kirkland said that after speaking with members of the ASSU committee, it seemed that even some of them were not aware of the election.

Salmers is concerned the USSU condemned the whole election without speaking with her. She called their communication on the issue “inappropriate.”

“What bothers me about the whole situation is the fact that the USSU executive did not contact me when I was the one that organized the election. They just assumed after someone had complained about it that that was the true story.”

But Ben Fawcett, vice-president student issues on the USSU says it was not just the complaints. He is an arts and science student, but he said he was not aware there was an election until he logged onto PAWS and saw the vote tab.

“We don’t want this to be delayed any further. We want it to be re-done as quickly as possible but in a way that students really know it’s happening and that they have the equal opportunity to run if they want to and to know who they’re voting for.”

Salmers says some of the confusion arose during election time because Thresher did not make enough efforts to campaign.

She said the next call for nominations, however, will be thoroughly advertised.

“This time we’re going to be using obnoxious advertising. We’re going to be using plasma screens, we’re going to be putting things up on all these windows, we’re going to be going through Facebook, through email; we’re going to hopefully satisfy the people that complained.”

Salmers hopes to put out the call for nominations next week.