The Student Government Association has seen a decline in participation among their association with two freshmen senators most recently running unopposed. Meanwhile, the switch back to online voting has not substantially increased SGA voting turnout, as it was intended.
Carson Adams, an education major, and Paige Locatto, a communication major, were both elected to freshman SGA senator seats by default, but this is not a trend according to election records.
In the fall of 2011, six freshman ran for the two freshman senate positions with only 88 freshmen voting. The election was a closed election where students were only allowed to vote during a certain time period in the War Memorial Student Union.
The next academic year, fall 2012, 14 freshmen ran for the senate positions with 482 freshmen voting in the close election, a significant increase from the year before even though election styles remained the same.
SGA President Gregory Crovetto said the sudden low participation was mainly because many of the freshmen interested are involved with the Freshmen Leadership Council and did not want to move on to a freshman senate seat.  
“When it came time to run for those freshmen senate positions, the freshman that wanted to get involved joined Freshmen Leadership Council, so they were like ‘We’re doing this, we don’t necessarily want to do that,'” said Crovetto. “Traditionally, at least for the past three or four years, those freshmen on the Freshmen Leadership Council will run for those senate positions. This year, they were kind of like ‘No, we want to stay here and do this.’ They didn’t want to move onto the senate yet. So when it came time to vote, we were stuck with nobody running. We promoted it and everything; it just didn’t pan out freshman wise.”
The freshman senate race was not the only SGA election that has seen low participation recently.
Last semester, spring 2013, only two candidates ran for each of the top SGA positions: Chief Justice, Vice President and President. After being elected, Crovetto was forced to fill roughly 10 to 15 senate positions because no students had run for them.
And, though it was the first SGA election since the spring of 2011 that voting was open and online, only 1,614 students voted out of the approximately 15,000 enrolled for the semester.
This compared to the SGA general election records the academic year before, in spring 2012, where voting was closed and only allowed in the Student Union, is not a significant difference.
In that election, while a number of students ran for senate positions, the vice presidential seat was the only top SGA position with two students competing, leaving the presidential and chief justice seats unopposed.
Also, only 1,003 students voted out of the approximately 14,500 enrolled for the semester.
After this election, former SGA president Branden Summers altered the voting system, taking it back to an open election policy. The difference between the two general elections is only 611 more students voting under the open, online system.
The main arguments against the open, online voting system, according to Crovetto, came from former SGA Chief Justice William Takewell, who he said felt like the system could be easily manipulated.
“The reason they changed it back to closed voting before was because the argument was that will people just go up to somebody and pressure them into voting,” said Crovetto. “They wanted to make it more how your municipal voting is where you go in a voting booth and no one knows who you voted for and you have to make your own decision. That was the reasoning behind it.”
“But they kind of opted for ‘Do we want to have less turnout with less opinion from students or do we want to have more opinion and a few of them could have been persuaded?’ That’s the argument there.”
Crovetto said that though with the open voting system, some students may be persuaded by candidates, the system has no loopholes as far as it being online and said SGA investigates reports from students of candidates forcing votes.
“If we get reports of people influencing other people’s vote, then we investigate them all,” said Crovetto. “We talk to those individuals and they get one warning and if there is a second time they get kicked out of the race pretty much. But things didn’t get too crazy this year with that.”
Though SGA general election records show the open voting system having little impact, the open election policy has improved Homecoming voter turnout.
In the 2013 Homecoming open elections, 3,053 students voted, compared to the academic year before where only 1,289 voted in the closed Homecoming election.
Crovetto said the open voting system is more efficient than the closed because “even if a few did slip through the cracks, having that larger amount means a little bit more.”