LSU 2022 Student Government elections take place Wednesday, when students can vote on student body president, vice president, senators for their respective colleges and College Council. 
Elections have been pushed back to Thursday due to the university’s closure Wednesday ahead of severe weather. 
Elections will now be held from 7:30 a.m. Thursday to 7:30 a.m. on Friday. Students can vote via Tigerlink for student body president, vice president, senators for their respective colleges and college council.

Students can access the voting portal on TigerLink. SG uses a ranked choice voting system, which means students will rank candidates by preference on their ballots. 

There are four tickets this semester: EVOLVE, RISE, Scott-Rovere and F*** Around and Find Out.

Here’s where each ticket’s executive candidates stand on issues facing campus and how their administration plans to tackle them. 

EVOLVE

Political communications junior Lizzie Shaw and psychology junior Nicholas St. Mary are running for president and vice president under the EVOLVE ticket. Shaw would be the first female SG president in 15 years. Their campaign is focused on student needs through mental health resources and teacher accountability.

As a student who has tried to access mental health resources on campus, Shaw said it can get “convoluted” as to what resources are available and what students’ rights are. Shaw wants to create a “Mental Health Bill of Rights” that tells exactly what rights students have and shows them mental health resources at LSU.

Shaw currently serves as the SG director of outreach. She previously served the Student Media Board, the governor’s 2019 student task force and was the vice president of programming for her sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha.

St. Mary is currently the SG president’s executive assistant and serves on the student technology fee committee. In the past, he was a member of the freshman leadership council. 

Shaw believes they are different from other campaigns because neither she nor St. Mary want to go into Louisiana politics, so they feel they can be as “candid as possible” with the LSU administration.

“We’re not going to go in there guns blazing all the time, but we are when it comes to student needs and necessities,” Shaw said. “We want to make sure we are fierce advocates to the administration without anything holding us back like the fear of job prospects or future networking.”

RISE TIGERS

Mechanical engineering junior Colin Raby and broadcast journalism sophomore Georgia Peck are running for president and vice president under the RISE ticket. They have stressed the importance of rising above what they call petty partisan politics in SG. 

Raby is a senator for the College of Engineering and is vice chair of the Budget and Appropriations Committee. He is also a residential assistant and served as a governor’s fellow summer of 2021, which he said allowed him to see the inner workings of government. Peck is an RA and former member of Tiger TV.  

Peck said that her being an outsider to SG is an asset since she brings a different perspective. She also said her experience in TigerTV brought her more awareness of the campus climate.  

“Coming from the Senate side, I’ve seen Student Government,” Raby said. “I’ve seen the executive branch operate for two years now and I’m consistently disappointed by how every year you see them promise high and then not deliver. So one of the big things that we’ve been doing is that it’s not just about ideas, it’s about making ideas happen.” 

Raby said they want to improve transparency on where student’s money goes on the fee bill and to have it readily accessible for students to see. They also want to add more days to the semester for emergencies so students don’t have to take Saturday classes in the event of a natural disaster. 

Raby said they want to have information tailored for individual student’s needs so that students aren’t swamped with a load of information on resources which aren’t relevant to them. 

Raby also wants to create a ‘President’s Club’ where the heads of student organizations can meet with the executive branch on a regular basis. Raby said that it will be his first executive order on day one. He said this will allow SG to provide information to the clubs on the resources available to them and will allow the clubs to give SG a greater idea on what’s going on in the student body, since students interact with these organizations more than SG. 

SCOTT-ROVERE

Devin Scott and Isabella Rovere are running for president and vice president under the Scott-Rovere ticket. Scott is the Chief Policy officer in the SG executive branch and previously the Director of Diversity. 

Rovere is the Director of ‘We’re Committed’ and serves as chapter president of her sorority, Alpha Phi. She is also the chair of the Advisory Council for Power-Based Violence and previously served on the student task force for Title IX. 

“We hope to implement policies which are holistic to student’s needs, which include their financial security needs, mental health services, academic preparedness and career readiness,” Scott said. 

Scott said that they want to create an assessment which analyzes student’s mental health and academic readiness so advisors will be better suited to reaching out to students who need help and providing them with resources tailored to what they specifically need. 

They also want to improve the Title IX office, increasing its diversity and adding more investigators while also making sure students know their rights under Title IX. Scott also said he wants to expand opportunities for minorities at LSU. 

Scott said that they want to improve relations and dialogue between administration and SG. He said administration can be out of touch with student’s needs, which is why it’s important for continued dialogue. They also said they want to have greater transparency in the university’s budget so student’s see where the money’s going. 

FAFO

Architecture seniors Harris Quadir and Matt McClure are running for president and vice president of F*** Around and Find Out. Their campaign focuses on administrative accountability and for SG to take itself less seriously.

Elections don’t have to be “pretentious,” Quadir said, and elections don’t have to be done the way they are now.

Although Quadir has thought of running for SG president since his freshman year, he believes that preparing “months and months” in advance is not necessary, which is why he and McClure decided to begin campaigning on social media on March 22, just a week before voting begins. 

“When we started talking about it, there needs to be more representation and more diversity on who is running within this presidential election, so we said, ‘f*** it. Why not? What do we have to lose?’ We want attention to ourselves, obviously, so we said ‘let’s f*** around and find out,’” Quadir said.

One of their goals in the campaign is to hold administration accountable to ensure that the voice of the student body is heard. They plan to do this through administrative report cards.

“Each semester, we would evaluate administrators’ response and ability to work with student leaders within Student Government,” Quadir said. “This would go into effect by having student senators and as well as other remembers of Student Government CC one specific email and create each department within the executive branch to have that specific branch work and evaluate administrators and give them a grade.”