Tuesday’s Homecoming Elections for the vacant SGA Senate seats featured a variety of issues. 

Prior to the election, the names of the candidates for the five Senate seats were not available on the SGA website, which appears to violate Article II Section I, Subsection E of the fall 2017 elections manual. This requires the final candidates names to be posted at least three class days prior to the day after the election. 

The names were not posted online, nor were they made available to The Crimson White, despite multiple attempts to obtain them. In addition, the results of the election were not made available until Thursday morning, which appears to violate Article I Section 8 of the Elections Manual, which dictates that the results of the election must be posted “in an appropriate campus location no later than 4:30 PM on the day after the election.”

Ethan Fialkow, a senior marketing major and chair of the University Elections Board, said the names not being put online was a result of a late decision by the Board to place names on the ballot.

“We originally had it set up where it was going to be… like an all-write in option, and to increase voter participation, we decided to put names on the ballot,” Fialkow said.

The original decision to have a write-in only election was made not because there were not official candidates, but because the election was originally just a write-in election, Fialkow said. 

Fialkow also explained that the reason the election results were not posted sooner was because posting them took longer than anticipated. 

The Board is aware of the potential violation of its own rules and is currently discussing this along with other election violations.

The current Elections Board was filled in September after all the members of the previous Board resigned, mainly due to the Office of Student Conduct’s investigation into SGA President Jared Hunter and its results. 

Fialkow said that although the Board is new, they are committed to making sure the election process is done correctly.

As of Thursday morning, students can view the election results for Homecoming Court and the SGA Senate on the SGA webpage at sga.sa.ua.edu.