Pictured Above: This will be Student Government’s first year as a consolidated body with representatives from all three campuses.
Aya Diab | The Crow’s Nest
By Sophie Ojdanic
The newly-consolidated Student Government has opened applications for a special election to fill vacant seats on the university-wide senate and the respective campus councils.
According to its website, the SG election application, which must be submitted via DocuSign, opened on Aug. 24 and will close on Sept. 4.
Elections will take place Sept. 22 and 23.
“It is of incredible importance that we fill all of our allotted senate seats so that St. Petersburg is represented to the fullest extent of the SG Constitution” on university-wide decision-making, said Isaiah Castle, lieutenant governor of the St. Petersburg campus.
SG senator Veronica Jimenez also encouraged interested students to apply.
“You can be a voice for the student body and representation for your home campus,” Jimenez said. “Students will be able to enact change that they would like to see within Student Government or on campus.”
For decades, each USF campus had its own, independent SG led by a president and vice president, senate and supreme court, but that changed with consolidation.
Now, there is a university-wide president and vice president, a 60-member senate and a nine-member supreme court appointed by the president.
Each campus has a governor and lieutenant governor, a nine-member campus council and a five-member circuit court appointed by the governor.
Five seats on the university-wide senate are automatically allocated to each campus, with the remaining seats apportioned according to the number of students enrolled on each campus. This year, Tampa will have 44 of the 60 seats.
In the Sept. 22-23 special election, St. Petersburg voters will be filling four openings in the senate and all nine campus council seats.
According to St. Petersburg’s supervisor of elections, Savannah Carr, 17 applications have been received as of Aug. 26.
Tampa has 14 available seats on the senate and seven on its campus council, while Sarasota-Manatee has three available seats on the senate and five on its campus council.
The St. Petersburg council “would be 100 percent dedicated to serving the interest of the St. Petersburg campus and its students, will oversee A&S (activity & service fee) funding (and) confirmations for local positions,” Castle said. “This is in contrast to the (university-wide) senate, which serves the combined interests of all three campuses.”
Voter turnout has been notoriously poor on the St. Petersburg campus, where the vast majority of students are commuters. Tampa turnout has also been low.
From 2017 to 2019, voter turnout in Tampa dropped 68 percent. In St. Petersburg, only 15 percent of the student body voted in the spring 2020 presidential election.
Castle encouraged anyone interested in applying for a position in SG to contact Shemar McKoy, the university-wide supervisor of elections, at sg-ercsupervisor@usf.edu, or Carr at savannahc4@usf.edu.
