Writer Gavin Ros calls for greater election transparency within Loyola’s student government.
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Writer Gavin Ros calls for greater election transparency within Loyola’s student government.
In November 2024, Donald Trump was elected president of the U.S. with 49.9% of the vote, The Associated Press reported. In June, Claudia Sheinbaum was elected president of Mexico with 61.2% of the vote, according to El País México. Last week, Erin Tylutki was elected president of the Student Government of Loyola Chicago with — well — we don’t know.
The SGLC Instagram page announced April 9 third-years Erin Tylutki and Haaziya Saiyed prevailed in their three-way race for president and vice president. They also announced third-year Lindsey Elliott, who ran unopposed, was elected to the post of chief justice.
And that’s it.
SGLC has said nothing further about the multitude of senate races on the ballot. Presumably because all of those races were also unopposed — there were too few candidates to fill every slot — and everyone listed on the ballot was elected.
The student body has only been given one piece of information aside from the election’s results. Apparently, over 1,400 votes were cast, tripling turnout from last year’s election, The Phoenix reported. This demonstrates an increased student interest in student government elections, occurring after an especially heated campaign. It’s also probably related to how last year’s election had zero contested races whatsoever.
The fact the two other candidates — first-year Matthew Erlec and third-year Ronan Valera — posed any threat to Tylutki and Saiyed whatsoever speaks to a greater issue of students perhaps feeling underrepresented in the student government status quo — which Tylutki, as the incumbent vice president, represents.
You would think the powers that be in SGLC would at least do students the basic courtesy of telling us which candidates got how many votes. But the election board doesn’t — and hasn’t — in several years.
In a campaign marked by concerns about a lack of transparency in student government, this is a bad look, demonstrating the incoming administration has no immediate plans to change tack from its predecessors in increasing transparency.
Irrespective of any particular concerns about transparency, though, an election where vote totals aren’t released is less democratically legitimate regardless of its context. Even dictators understand this, and they go through the motions of making up fake results to release to the public — as in the case of Azerbaijan’s 2013 election, when the regime released vote totals before the election began, according to NPR.
I don’t think anyone is rigging SGLC’s elections. But transparency is nonetheless a vital part of the democratic process.
Public vote totals would also benefit members of SGLC. Say an up-and-coming senator wants to consider a presidential bid. It would benefit them to know what works and what doesn’t, which candidates won in landslides, who came close and what the typical margins of victory are.
The lack of knowledge is itself emblematic of the questions surrounding transparency in student government, which has the potential to lead to increasing disillusionment with SGLC altogether and a lack of student participation in the process.
SGLC should also release the results just because it’d be fun. Elections are fascinating rituals, and for many people — myself included — it can be enjoyable to get down into the nitty-gritty of the results.
Right now, we don’t even know which of the candidates got second place.
SGLC, release the election results. It’s the right thing for democracy, and it’s the right thing for the student body.
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