Four months after AMS Council created an ad hoc committee on student election engagement, the committee still hasn’t met.
The committee was formed in April after turnout in March’s student government elections fell to 6.9 per cent of eligible voters and a record four out of five AMS executive races were uncontested. When the committee was formed, the intention was for it to present its results to Council in September of this year. However, AMS President Cole Evans told Council on August 4 it had yet to meet.
In an interview with The Ubyssey, Evans cited the organizational challenge of “getting representation from different groups” on the committee. The committee members are drawn from AMS leadership, AMS staff, student representatives in the Senate and Board of Governors as well as three students-at-large who are unaffiliated with the AMS.
Evans said that the process of forming the committee mostly finished in mid-July. As of August 29, there was still an opening on the AMS website for the graduate student at-large on the committee, which Evans said was the only opening left on the committee to the best of his knowledge.
Evans confirmed that the committee would likely not be able to meet the goal of presenting a report to council in September. “I think that we still have a lot of time before our next election cycle,” he said.
On his priorities for engagement with voters in his second term as AMS President, Evans said, “I also think that we want to take a look at how are we recruiting and developing candidates to run in elections, to make sure that we're reducing barriers for people who might be interested in running for AMS elections.”
At AMS Council on August 25, newly-selected committee chair Max Holmes cited the large membership — nine voting and three non-voting members — as the cause for the committee’s lack of action.
“I [am] proposing some eliminations to the committee, because we don't need to have that many people when normal committees have seven people on them,” he said.
Holmes said the committee would meet in the first or second week of September and that members would work on creating an updated timeline for the report.
“I discuss[ed] with the committee that we can get recommendations to this council hopefully around December.”
— with files from Nathan Bawaan