A student guide to the elections

Jacqueline Perlin
assistant news editor
If you’ve been asked for your autograph at school lately, it’s probably for a York student’s nomination in the upcoming 2011 York elections.
The nomination period ends this Friday, and some familiar faces have been seen around campus looking for your signature. Vanessa Hunt, vp campus life of the York Federation of Students (YFS), was seen gathering signatures for the position of YFS president, while Founders College Council president Robert Cerjanec was filling out nomination forms for vp-operations.

Other members of the YFS – such as Calumet director Monirul Pathan and liberal arts and professional studies director Siva Vimalachandran – have also been spotted gathering signatures for the YFS executive positions of vp equity and vp campus life respectively.
Students hoping to run for an executive position are required to gather 100 signatures from York students, while candidates running for directoral positions must garner 30 signatures.
Several public events are also planned throughout the campaigning period, including an all-candidates meeting March 4 at 6 p.m. in room 307 at the Student Centre. The meeting will outline the rules and regulations stipulated by the revised YFS elections bylaws, which underwent significant changes earlier this year after last year’s controversial election.
The changes were adopted from two documents – the university’s McCamus report and the YFS’s Davis LLP report – which outlined a number of recommendations to make the student elections more impartial.
Last year’s concerns surrounding the election included issues regarding the criteria for disqualifying candidates; comments on the appointment of the Chief Returning Officer (CRO) whose job it is to oversee the elections; and questions over what constitutes election campaign material.
This year’s elections will be overseen by the new CRO, Obinna Oraka, who has promised to follow the new bylaws when making
decisions.
Oraka, who sits on the Elections Committee that runs the electoral process, is joined by YFS executive director Jeremy Salter, YFS Atkinson director Ayesha Zubair and YFS Founders director Divya Khurana.
If anything is in contention during the elections period – such as a the disqualification of a candidate – it will involve the Elections Appeals Committee, which is composed of two general students, Summer Khan and Mariam Azzin, as well as speaker Ashkon Hashemi, internal coordinator for Canadian Federation of Students Ontario.
The candidate debates will commence next week, with one to be held at Glendon campus March 8, and the other at Keele campus March 10.
The voting period will begin March 15 and end March 18. Students will have access to nine polling stations across Keele and Glendon campus, which will be open Monday to Thursday from 10 am to 6 pm and Friday from 10 am to 4 pm.