As mentioned in last week's UCL Union News, a motion passed at UCL Union Council on Monday 15th January means that there will be a bit of a change to the usual running of the UCL Union March General Election. In short, only the positions of full-time Sabbatical and part-time Executive Officers will be open for nominations, rather than the full complement.
This is for two reasons. The first is that we're moving elections over to the 21st century and having online voting. This presents us with problems identifying who is eligible to vote for certain constituent positions (Hall Reps or Womens' Officer, for instance) by your IS UserID alone and would necessitate the running of a paper election alongside an online one - confusing, and not much help to anyone.
The second, and more important, reason is that we're running a referendum alongside the election to find out if you approve of a massive overhaul of the way UCL Union is governed (more on that in coming weeks). If it goes through, there's a very real chance that many of the positions currently held at UCL Union will no longer exist. Obviously no one wants to go through the motions of getting legitimately elected only to find themselves out of a job at the end of it, so we’re just electing the central positions of day-to-day Union operations for now. If the Governance review is accepted, we’ll elect the new positions in the new academic year. If it’s not, we’ll elect them as they currently stand before then.
Hopefully that clears up exactly what’s going on with elections for this Easter. If you’d like to read the motion in full, click the link below or e-mail uclu-general.secretary@ucl.ac.uk if you have any questions.
http://www.uclunion.org/student-union/downloads/motion-march-elections-amended.pdf
This is for two reasons. The first is that we're moving elections over to the 21st century and having online voting. This presents us with problems identifying who is eligible to vote for certain constituent positions (Hall Reps or Womens' Officer, for instance) by your IS UserID alone and would necessitate the running of a paper election alongside an online one - confusing, and not much help to anyone.
The second, and more important, reason is that we're running a referendum alongside the election to find out if you approve of a massive overhaul of the way UCL Union is governed (more on that in coming weeks). If it goes through, there's a very real chance that many of the positions currently held at UCL Union will no longer exist. Obviously no one wants to go through the motions of getting legitimately elected only to find themselves out of a job at the end of it, so we’re just electing the central positions of day-to-day Union operations for now. If the Governance review is accepted, we’ll elect the new positions in the new academic year. If it’s not, we’ll elect them as they currently stand before then.
Hopefully that clears up exactly what’s going on with elections for this Easter. If you’d like to read the motion in full, click the link below or e-mail uclu-general.secretary@ucl.ac.uk if you have any questions.
http://www.uclunion.org/student-union/downloads/motion-march-elections-amended.pdf
