After weeks of appeals Empower has at last been officially recognized as the winner in the 2017 IU Student Association election. The Election Commission released final results Tuesday, after the IUSA Supreme Court resolved multiple appeals.
In a Wednesday interview, junior Dan Niersbach, IUSA president-elect, said his administration’s first action will be to pass a budget through Congress. He plans to institute election reform, and said these plans will manifest over several years.
Niersbach said he plans to create a committee of Congress members, election commission hopefuls and members of the executive branch to plan for these changes.
“I would love to see the executive branch itself be much more involved with the election,” Niersbach said.
He said among the hurdles his ticket faced and which his administration will face in the future, the biggest is instilling a positive culture surrounding student government.
People get competitive, Niersbach said. The reality of campaigning for IUSA is that conflicts do arise, but he is focusing on the positive aspects of the campaign.
“But we want to mend those and make sure everyone has a positive professional working culture and can ultimately be friends brought together by the fact that we wanted to do IUSA and not be divided by what ticket you were on,” he said.
Olivia Malone, IU sophomore and Empower’s chief of staff, said she thought the ticket’s biggest strength was how prepared the members were in terms of research on specific policy. She’s happy that her ticket did not have to defend itself in court, but the most pressing issue she saw in the election was voter apathy.
“It didn’t feel like a worthwhile endeavor for people who didn’t know about student government or didn’t know how to get involved,” Malone said.
Niersbach said if other tickets had read the election code, they wouldn’t have made mistakes that they did. One petition, filed on behalf of Engage and not made public until Tuesday, asked the court to order the reviewal evidence the ticket said constituted candidate dishonesty and finance violations.
Niersbach said the debit card number mentioned in the petition and listed on receipts accompanying his financial statements belonged to an account he opened for Empower at IU Credit Union. He said he didn’t want his personal banking information made public.
Now that the election is over, he said he’ll be closing the account and returning money to those who donated to the campaign.
Niersbach said his administration will try to pursue constitutional reform and possibly redistricting IUSA Congress to eliminate residential representatives and double the amount of academic representatives because Niersbach said these two often overlap.
“And we’ve even explored ideas like having multicultural organizations like La Casa and LGBTQ+ and Black Student Union maybe having a seat,” Niersbach said.
He said his administration looks forward to receiving the VOICE report. VOICE, which stands for Vision Of the Ideal College Environment, is a survey of the student body’s views on an array of issues. The original report was commissioned by President Michael McRobbie in 2007, according to the IUSA website.
Niersbach said one of these reports was supposed to be created this academic year, but was not prioritized by the current administration. The report would help IUSA craft student-focused policy.
Members of the incoming administration will also lobby state and federal government to secure more tuition funding for veterans and possibly pass Indiana hate crime laws, Niersbach said.
“We’ll see if we can make the rest of Indiana a lot more like Bloomington,” Niersbach said.
