Students voting in the 2015 SGA Presidential election will still be able to receive food and goodies in exchange for casting their vote.
Here’s the catch — the SGA Election Commission will be providing the goodies, not the candidates themselves. To be exact, the Election Commission will be providing 200 Topper’s ice cream cones the first day and 200 the second day inside of Election Commission voting areas. Along with the ice cream, students will also be receiving a free t-shirt as well.
These voting areas ran by the Election Commission will be unbiased and students voting in them will not be encouraged to vote for any single candidate, however, looking up the candidate’s platforms before voting is encouraged. Nicklas Bajema, Supervisor of Elections, spoke with KnightNews.com following Tuesday’s Nicholson School of Communication debate.
“We really want to entice students to come out and say ‘hey we have a voice in this and we wanna change this’ and we want to say, ‘hey you showed that you care about your school, why can’t we show that we care for you too?’” said Bajema.
The 2015 SGA Presidential election will be the first election where candidates themselves are not permitted to provide voters with food, drink and prizes during the candidate voting process. The bill, which was not signed in time for the 2014 SGA Presidential election, now considers all the aforementioned items a bribe. Candidates are now only allowed to provide students with educational materials, such as pamphlets and stickers.
Bajema said the funding for the ice cream and t-shirts come from the allocated budget for SGA elections.
“There will be laptops for students to vote and all you have to do is go up, logon to myUCF, go on the voting page, click vote and choose the candidate you want to choose and we will give you the goodies,” said Bajema.
