With LSU Student Government’s spring election season in full swing, students may have noticed a rare occurrence with the tickets running for executive office: There’s only one of them.
Campaigning under the moniker “Affect,” the single ticket is headed by the current SG director of governmental relations Jason Badeaux and deputy chief of staff Leah Sanders for fall 2017 president and vice president, respectively.
“The Affect campaign is aptly named because it’s really been our goal over this season and, hopefully, over the next year, to push out initiatives that really impact students in their day-to-day lives,” Badeaux said.
Badeaux noted one of the main goals of the campaign is to have solid initiatives already in action before the election’s end. As the Affect ticket is running unopposed, the candidates are focusing on laying groundwork for their initiatives during the weeks of election season thus far.
Some of the initiatives Badeaux and Sanders have planned are the “Safe Rides” Program, in which SG would partner with a ride-share service like Uber or Lyft to give students discounted rides during certain times of the night as well as the scantron distribution program, under which SG-funded testing materials would be located in all major buildings on campus and not solely in the SG office.
“As we all know, clickers went up in price at the beginning of this school year,” Sanders said of another initiative. “I have formed a committee with some student senators, the chief technology officer and some other administrators and we’re researching to find a new clicker that … works for all colleges … and then is cheaper for students.”
While the Affect ticket has already been at work on its initiatives, both Badeaux and Sanders said students can still see them and other supporters of the campaign every day this week in Free Speech Plaza to talk about the election.
Students who want to join the campaign can get involved by sending a message to the Affect 2017 Facebook page.
Badeaux attributed the absence of an opposing ticket to a lack of participation in SG. He urges any student who doesn’t agree with the Affect ticket to join SG and share their ideas.
The March 23 open forum with the candidates, sponsored by SG, has been cancelled.
Clarification: The Affect ticket is the only ticket with candidates running for executive office. Another ticket, Grad Gold, has candidates running in the Graduate School.