Undergraduate Student Government campaign season starts today


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Undergraduate Student Government campaign season officially began at 12 a.m. today.

Candidates will spend the next two weeks reaching out to students in hopes of becoming the next president or being elected to the Senate.

The elections will determine the next USG president and vice president, who will run as one ticket.

The elections will also determine the three Greek senators, the three commuter senators and the six residential senators for the 2011-12 school year.

The three presidential tickets are sophomores Eric Burse, current president of the Black Student Assembly, and Andy Greos, USG Program Board production director; juniors Alex Fadil, the executive vice president of the judicial board of the Interfraternity Council, and Rohan Mehra, a current fraternity president; and junior Monish Tyagi, USG director of Campus Affairs, and sophomore Logan Lachman, a Greek senator.

The 20 senatorial candidates include 12 Greek candidates and eight candidates vying for residential seats. The three commuter senators will be write-in candidates, so they will not be eligible for public funding or have their profiles on the USG elections website.

The competition for Greek senator, a position three people ran for last year, will be more intense because of the large number of candidates.

This year, the Elections Code, which sets guidelines for campaigns, added the option of public funding and altered the rules for campaign endorsements.

“Last year’s election was pretty good — there weren’t any major problems so the changes we made were minimal,” said USG Elections and Recruitment Co-Chair Juan Orjuela.

Presidential and Vice Presidential tickets can now be reimbursed for up to $625 of the $1,500 they are allowed to spend. Senatorial candidates can be reimbursed for up to $50 of their $300 spending limit.

Organizations used to be able to endorse as many candidates as they wanted, but are now limited to one presidential ticket and three commuter, three Greek and six residential senators.

Any organization can endorse one presidential ticket, but it is up to the candidates to publicize their endorsements.

In past elections, the average number of votes is 4,500, but USG is aiming for 6,000 this year, Orjuela said. This would represent more than one-third of USC’s undergraduates.