With this afternoon's chairperson elections, ASMSU's Student Assembly may have violated its code of operations, which specifies election guidelines.
The assembly must be notified of the vacancy and time and place of the elections and applications must be available "no less than seventeen class days" prior to the date of the election, under Section 27 of the Student Assembly Code of Operations.
Representatives could not specify the date they were informed of the elections nor could they verify when the date packets were made available.
The code also states applications must be turned in no later than seven days before the election, but applications could be turned in up until Tuesday, two days before the election.
Also, under Section 27, Part B, the ASMSU Director of Human Resources is required to inform the student body with details of the impending election in a newspaper advertisement days before the election. The State News advertising department confirmed that ASMSU had not placed any such advertisement.
ASMSU's Director of Human Resources, Rachel Gonzalez, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
The assembly held two "brief" meetings last week, which differs from its usual bi-weekly schedule, which allows the representatives to elect the chairpersons for its 44th session in what is technically the third meeting of the new session. According to the organization's bylaws, elections can only be held at the assembly's third meeting.
Last week's meetings were held in order to conduct the elections this week, said Scott Lachman, vice chairperson for student funding. He also said he would like to see undergraduate students have "more of a say" in elections.
"On other campuses, the entire student body votes for their executives," he said. "MSU is one of the few campuses that internally elects its top leadership."
The meetings did give the 24 new college representatives a chance to become familiar with the organization.
"All the people in leadership spots went through and talked about what they do, and there was a brief crash course in parliamentary procedure," said Mike Leahy, a College of Social Science representative. "The first meeting is always just get-to-know-you kind of stuff."
Leahy will challenge incumbent Roger Ludy in today's Student Assembly chairperson elections.
"Either one of us would be good," Leahy said. "The assembly gets to decide which person they want to be their chair. We're both qualified."
Leahy lost to Nigel Scarlett for the position of vice chairperson for external affairs. Scarlett is running for the position again against David Schmidt, from the College of Social Science. Scarlett said if Leahy does not win the chairperson seat, Scarlett will run against Leahy for vice chairperson for external affairs.
Juan Carlos Elizalde, a representative from the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, is running for vice chairperson for internal affairs unopposed.
Joey Nowak can be reached at nowakjo2@msu.edu.
