Volume 141, Issue 9 Wednesday, March 30, 2022
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A QUIET ELECTION YEAR
Photo by Edward Cruz / Contributor
With only one campaign on the ticket, SGA considers its future ABBY ANN RAMSEY Staff Writer
When Abbey Lawrence, a junior geography major, began her freshman year at UT, she and some of her friends decided to go to a student organization fair on Ped Walkway. It was there she decided to apply for the Student Government Association’s (SGA) first-year leadership council (FYLC), which she says gave her one of her favorite college experiences as well as some of her closest friends. “I feel like it really set the foundation for basically my whole time at UT, not even just involvement in SGA, but all kinds of things,” Lawrence said. Lawrence would not hesitate to tell you how much she has loved her time in SGA. Even after her freshman year was cut short due to the pandemic, she continued to pursue the organization. After serving as a member of the FYLC, Lawrence moved on to become a senator, a senator secretary, the director of the environment and sustainability affairs committee and is now running for student services committee with the SGA campaign “Evolve.” The past two campaigns Lawrence has wit-
nessed were completely digital campaigns, so this year will look entirely different to her. What is also glaringly different though, is that Evolve is running completely unopposed. The campaigns in 2021 and 2020 saw the beginning of a dwindling in voter turnout for SGA elections, according to Ben Pham, a junior aerospace engineering student and this year’s election commissioner. Even though the student body was not turning out as much, though, SGA was coming in full swing with three large campaigns each year, competing online for the votes. Although this year’s ballot makes every Evolve candidate a shoe-in to win, the team is not necessarily viewing it as a positive for SGA as whole. Lawrence sees the race less as something she has to work hard to win and more as a mission to advocate for the organization she loves and ultimately bridge the gap between it and students so her team can successfully pursue their goals of helping the university. “It’s almost as if we’re not campaigning for ourselves as individual candidates but campaigning for student government as an organization,” Lawrence said. “But also just trying to restore that space for students to exist and matter and belong and have a place to express themselves and meet other students — all the things that SGA kinda felt like it was for me
when I first became involved.” As seen with campaigns in previous years, Lawrence said this turn of events was not what they initially expected and thinks it has pointed out some bigger issues. “The fact that we are the only SGA campaign that is running is definitely something that is concerning to all of us because that just shows how difficult it is for people to get involved and run their own campaign. I think that really points to the barriers in the election process as well as just getting involved at UT in general,” Lawrence said. Although she and the rest of the Evolve team see these barriers, Lawrence is confident in the current election commission teams’ efforts so far to recognize and fix the issues. That is exactly what Pham is setting out to do in his new role as election commissioner. After serving as a legal adviser for last year’s Forward campaign, he saw firsthand how people ran into confusion with election packets and do’s and don’ts. Accounting for the changes that may drive more campaign participation next year, Pham also sees the current situation as a sign of unification and collaboration within what the student body really wants for the future of UT. For that reason, he’s working with Evolve to, like Lawrence said, campaign for SGA.
“I feel like everyone’s just starting to come to the same conclusion on most issues,” Pham said. “Almost everyone’s having trouble with dining, with parking, they have trouble with inclusivity and instead of trying to compete against each other on that, I think from what I’ve seen … they’re all coming together instead and saying ‘let’s work together under this one party and push that effort forward.’” Pham also cites the pandemic as a reason for less and less participation in student government, which Lawrence and Evan Sudduth, a senior marketing major and current SGA chief of staff, echoed. “We’ve seen a lack of involvement in SGA and within any student organization, not only with our school but within all the SEC schools,” Sudduth said. “For me, I think that people, as they’re coming back to campus ... we kind of come back to what we call normal; people are choosing very specifically and intentionally what they want to get involved in.” Not only does the lack of motivation to get involved play into this, but Lawrence points to the aftermath of COVID-19 that may be imprinted on SGA longer than they had expected.
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