In this years’ spring elections, scheduled to take place March 3-5, University students will vote for a number of positions within student government and on four referenda. During this election process, organized by the University Board of Elections, students will vote for University Judiciary Committee, Honor Committee and Student Council representatives as well as for a Student Council president, vice president of administration and vice president of organizations among a few other positions. Following the general election, the Committee and UJC chairs will be chosen internally by the elected representatives.
Students will also have the opportunity to vote on four referenda, one sponsored by the University Guide Service, two sponsored by the UJC and one sponsored by Student Council. Candidate registration was open Feb. 4 to 11 and referendum proposals were due Feb. 14.
The Ballot — What to Look Out For
Along with Student Council leadership and representatives, as well as Honor Committee and UJC representatives, students will also vote for their Class Council presidents and vice presidents.
The Honor Committee is the only student government organization without a referendum on this year’s ballot, and Laura Howard, Honor chair and fourth-year College student, said the Committee is still grappling with the multi-sanction system enacted in 2023. This system allows sanctions for an Honor offense to vary in punity, rather than an automatic two semester leave of absence which was the original single-sanction system in place for any offense.
“I think we’re still in a transformative time for Honor,” Howard said. “We had the big multi-sanction Constitution in 2023 and the past two years have been about grappling with this, figuring out how [to] best represent the needs of the student body.”
Howard said she expects that candidates for Honor representative positions will have opinions regarding ways to fix some of the persistent problems, specifically with the multi-sanction system. She said one of these issues is the sanction gap — an issue when a suspension feels too severe but other sanctions are not severe enough.
Spring elections will allow University students to vote for 30 Honor representatives, and from there, those newly elected representatives come together to vote for a chair and six vice chairs, who will take office the first Monday of April.
For Student Council, University students will be voting for class council officers, Student Council president, Student Council vice president of administration and Student Council vice president of organizations. President, VPA and VPO candidates all require 100 signatures to be on the ballot, while class council and school representative candidates need 25. However, many class council races are uncontested or have no one running at all. Candidates must hit this signature count by Feb. 20.
Valentina Mendoza Gonzalez, Student Council president and fourth-year College student, wrote in an email to The Cavalier Daily that there are a multitude of issues she predicts candidates will address this year. These include University specific issues related to parking, housing and transportation, which have all been topics of conversations at recent general body meetings, especially when considering how to deal with things like the on-Grounds and off-Grounds housing availability and costs.
“At a local level, parking/housing/transportation are very important for our student population, and the Student Council is trying to forecast some of the big changes in these areas by advocating for student concerns,” Mendoza Gonzalez wrote.
There are also issues on a national scale about which Student Council is able to advise University administration, including federal executive orders, that Mendoza Gonzalez said Student Council candidates will likely address in their campaigns.
“At a national level, federal orders change the landscape of higher education, and while administrators have to be ready to act in compliance, Student Council is uniquely positioned to ensure they are a bridge in these big University-wide decisions,” Mendoza Gonzalez wrote.
Regarding UJC, Harper Jones, UJC chair and fourth-year College student, said there are not many issues to look out for besides their two referenda. University students will also be voting for UJC representatives during this election, but executive positions, like the next UJC chair, will be voted on internally by the elected representatives.
The Referenda
Four referenda have been proposed for this election — one to reinstate historical tours by the University Guide Service, one to add a student-athlete representative seat to the Student Council body, one to reapportion representative seats in the UJC and another to extend the UJC Statute of Limitations from 45 to 90 days. The University Guide Service referendum requires 950 signatures to appear on the ballot, while the other three will be on the ballot regardless of signatures because they were internally passed within their respective student self-governance organizations earlier this semester.
The referendum sponsored by individual members of the Guide Service — a student-led organization that works to give admissions tours to prospective students and historical tours of Grounds for the community — calls on the University to reinstate sanctioned “student-led and written historical tours of the University.” At the beginning of the Fall 2024 semester, the Guide Service was suspended by the University, which had concerns regarding the quality and reliability of these tours.
Guide Service leadership, however, has noted that while they had received constructive criticism regarding admissions tours, they had not been aware of issues with historical tours prior to the suspension. In response to the continued suspension of their historical tours, the Guide Service began conducting historical tours independently of the University in January.
Jack Giese, Guide Service co-chair and fourth-year College student, said that the Guide Service chose to continue historical tours independently because the organization felt strongly about their mission to share the history of the University, even without support from University administration. Giese said the Guide Service has still remained connected with administration in the past few months and the proposal for the referendum came from a place of wanting administration to support the organization’s mission.
“We have always been willing to work with the administration to get back to giving tours on behalf of the University as long as there is a commitment to student-led historical tours [and] autonomy for students to have their own perspectives on that history,” Giese said.
The referendum condemns the University for its recent actions towards the Guide Service and calls for the University to reinstate sanctioned student-led historical tours which the referendum says are “essential in preserving and spreading the full history of the University.” The referendum also calls for the University to increase publicization efforts and funding for the Guide Service. Along with increased funding from the University, it calls for the University to recognize the Guide Service as the primary provider of historical tours through written protection.
As of Feb. 17, this referendum has received over 1000 signatures and will officially appear on the ballot. Because this referendum is a nonbinding question — meaning the outcome is an advised opinion rather than an enforceable decision — it can pass with a majority vote from University students. Organizations co-sponsoring this referendum include the Asian Student Union, U.Va. Dissenters, the Minority Rights Coalition, the Queer Student Union, the Native American Student Union and Political Latinxs United for Movement & Action in Society.
Davis Taliaferro, Guide Service co-chair and fourth-year College student, said the Guide Service is not sponsoring the referendum as an organization but that most guides are generally in support of the resolution. He said the decision to sponsor independently was due to connections with administration and the fact that the Guide Service is a Special Status Organization — organizations that act on behalf of the University, having students provide duties the University would otherwise provide themselves.
“We had concerns that there would be potential issues since SSOs, in some instances, act as agents of the University,” Taliaferro said. “We didn’t want those technicalities getting in the way of us campaigning and raising support for this. We chose to sponsor as individuals so we could have full flexibility to promote this referendum.”
With two referenda on this year’s ballot, UJC has the potential to see big changes next term. Their first referendum to appear on the ballot calls to expand their representative pool, adding three seats to the College and one to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Currently, the UJC has 29 representatives from across the 13 undergraduate and graduate schools of the University. Each school has two representatives, except for the College, which has five.
Jones said the desire to expand their pool is in part due to an increasing number of cases that have been seen by the UJC in the past few years and also to standardize the proportions of representatives based on school population. The referendum will allow UJC to review student populations of each school at the University every four years and readjust allocated seats as needed.
“In the past, our representation has not been super quantified by actual student populations,” Jones said. “The amendment we’re proposing actually puts in place mechanisms to conduct a census that considers the undergraduate and graduate populations of each school to ensure that representation is proportional.”
The second UJC referendum to be on the ballot will extend the Statute of Limitations window from 45 days to 90 days. According to Jones, this window is the period from the date of the incident in which complaints can be raised to the Committee, meaning students have 45 days to raise a concern. She said the idea to extend the window has been brought up within UJC for a few years, because students are not always aware of the trial procedures and complaints must then be turned down when filed beyond that 45-day window.
On the ballot for Student Council is a referendum to add a student-athlete representative seat to the current general body. Passed unanimously by representatives Feb. 4, this referendum states each school can reserve a representative seat for a student-athlete.
According to Mendoza Gonzalez, student-athletes deal with challenges not faced by the average student and therefore deserve a representative to advocate for them. This referendum requires a two-thirds majority to pass.
All three of the UJC and Student Council referenda require two-thirds majority to pass, given at least 10 percent of the student body votes.
How to Vote
Voting will be done electronically, via online forms sent to students’ inboxes, which will direct students to BigPolls, UBE’s election platform. The form will be specific to each student, including only the elections in which they are eligible to vote — eligibility is determined by year and school within the University. A ranked-choice voting system will be used for positions within student government, while referenda will be listed as a “yes” or “no” question.
Zach Lederer, UBE chair and fourth-year College student, said that many of this year’s races are more contested than in years past, making it especially important to vote. For example, this year’s Student Council races for vice president for administration and vice president for organizations both have two candidates on the ballot, unlike last year when neither of these races were contested.
Prior student elections have faced issues with voter turnout and encouraging students to vote for their representatives. Lederer said that last year had a voter turnout of 34 percent of students casting a vote in at least one race. He said that while that percentage was higher than the year before, 34 percent is still relatively low, and that there are disparities in turnout depending on what school students are in.
“There's wide disparities, depending on what school of enrollment.” Lederer said. “We see very high turnout in the law school and the College overall, but in some of the other schools, we don't see as high [of] turnout. Hopefully we can see a higher turnout in some of these big races.”
Lederer encouraged students to vote in the upcoming elections and emphasized the impact that Student Council, Honor Committee and UJC can have on student life at the University.
“U.Va. is so unique in how much is delegated to students, so make your voices heard…” Lederer said. “There’s [also] a lot of great referenda on the ballot that will touch every single student at this University.”
As elections approach, The Cavalier Daily and UBE will be moderating a Student Council presidential debate among all candidates March 2 at 6 p.m.
Read More
Student Council hears from Madison House Student Board Members
By Lauren Seeliger | 12 hours agoMadison House is a University volunteer center that works to connect students with the local Charlottesville community through hundreds of volunteer opportunities
University terminates special status agreement with Guide Service
By Cecilia Mould | 18 hours agoFarmer said that the University will continue to support the organization with its current funding and assigned University space through the end of this academic year.
EDITORIAL: Elect Honor representatives committed to transparency
By Editorial Board | 19 hours agoEach candidate has looked to the past to gain a comprehensive understanding of the Honor system and has also exhibited forward-thinking solutions to the Committee’s present challenges.
