Coming off a student body president race defined by bad blood, Shruthi Sundaram is looking to make sure this year will be different.
Sundaram, chairwoman of the Board of Elections, will be in charge of implementing the revisions to campus election law crafted by Student Congress since last spring.
The revisions to the Student Code’s Title VI, which governs election law, include the creation of a points system for candidates’ violations and the approval of online signatures as a method for candidates to appear on the ballot, among other things.
DTH: How are you preparing for the upcoming elections?
Shruthi Sundaram: I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on (election law), making sure I understand the different sections, how they changed from last year, and how they are the same.
I know some of the problems we had last year came from the fact that as the Board of Elections, part of our job is to interpret some of the rules in Title VI, and some of the issues that arose last year were because we interpreted them differently than Student Congress intended for us to.
When we make decisions this year, it is going to be with more input from Student Congress, as far as “we wrote this to mean this.”
DTH: Do you think the election season will be as contentious this year as it was last year?
SS: I sure hope not, but I don’t think it will be because last year there were just a lot of factors that met that kind of gave way for the situation to occur. A lot of those factors aren’t here as far as some of the people. It’s a different mix of people and different characteristics are coming into play.