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The University of Michigan’s Central Student Government met Tuesday evening over Zoom to confirm representatives for the School of Public Health and School of Dentistry, as well as candidates for the Executive Committee of CSG.
Jarek Schmanski, LSA junior and recently elected speaker of the 13th Assembly, opened the meeting to resolve the March elections by confirming candidates for the Public Health School and Dentistry School.
“For those two schools, we had no file candidates, so we just had a number of write-ins that were tied in the March elections,” Schmanski said. “As the Assembly, our job is to break those ties (and) select one of the candidates to serve as a representative for the full year.”
Members discussed whether or not to delay the process to break those ties since the candidates weren’t present. If the election were delayed, students who were interested in being representatives for the Dentistry School or Public Health School, but did not officially run, could still fill those seats. However, Schmanski said the Assembly is supposed to resolve any election ties at their first meeting.
“I think probably the sooner we could resolve these elections, the better,” Schmanski said. “The sooner we can have a representative fill the seat, the sooner we can have those schools be represented at the Assembly.”
The Assembly then unanimously voted to elect Dentistry student Jacob Vieau and Public Health student Andrea Kennedy as representatives for their respective schools. Law school student Tyler Watt was unanimously approved for the Student General Council and rising Public Policy senior Ayden Makar was unanimously approved to be the director of the Student Organization Committee.
The Assembly then moved on to a discussion of the Election Code Study Act. This act is intended to appoint a task force to study and revise CSG’s Election Code. Schmanski said the March CSG election revealed issues with the Election Code as written, which he hopes will be addressed by the task force.
“For our March elections, there (were) a couple cases that had to be adjudicated through the Central Judiciary (Branch of CSG),” Schmanski said. “There’s a few somewhat glaring issues with the Election Code and some vagueness that could be ironed out, so the creation of this task force would try to alleviate that.”
This act was met with an objection from Hayden Jackson, a Rackham student and CSG member. Jackson said they believed the proposed task force should not be able to issue subpoenas and disagreed with the proposal for a set composition of the party affiliations of task force members.
“Giving blanket ability to issue subpoenas is not appropriate in this case,” Jackson said. “In addition, I’d like to echo the President (of CSG) to say that the proposal to include members from specific parties is a bizarre inclusion to me.”
The act was referred back to the Rules and Resolutions Committee.
Mario Thaqi, rising LSA junior and chair of the Finance Committee, then discussed the Spring Summer 2023 CSG Consolidated Budget Act. Thaqi said he believes the main goal of this act should be to increase Student Organization Committee funding in order to best allocate CSG funds.
“The main goal of the spring summer budget is to increase student organization funding,” Thaqi said. “It’s my philosophy that the people that best know how to spend (the funding money) are the e-boards of the student organizations. They know what their members want, what events to host to help their members.”
This act was met with no objections and was referred to the Finance Committee. The Assembly will next meet on May 23.
Daily Staff Reporter Aditya Kannan can be reached at kannana@umich.edu.