On April 26, the Associated Student Government elections will kick off with a barbeque outside the E Building complex on the Bellevue College campus.
The ASG election will decide which of this quarter’s candidates will become the next voice of BC and who will stand up for the student interests for the coming school year. There are ten positions to fill and quite a few students are fighting for a spot on the new school year’s ASG.
“Many students don’t know about ASG, and they really don’t think that ASG affects their student life much because we have to admit that we don’t see ASG everywhere around the campus. But the fact is that ASG has a very great defect into student life” said Thuy Ngoc Pham, an ASG candidate this year, during an interview for the upcoming election.
Split into two teams, the election candidates have been forming partnerships and relations all quarter. Executive candidate Thuy Pham, udicial board candidates Kristin Velez, Asami Bandai and Sean Juel, and representative Ignatia Heidi Yota come together to form Team Justice.
“[Team Justice] represents Diversity, Equality, Unity, Compassion and Justice” said Pham.
The other side of the spectrum, and competition against Team Justice, is Team Enthusiasm, consisting of Ishatpal Singh Momi vying for ASG Presidency, Michael Yoon for ASG Vice President (or VP) of Student Affairs and Pluralism, and Keturah Anderson, going for Campus Life and Events Representative.
“I want to bring the clubs in the school more to life” said Momi on his goals if he earns ASG president. “I feel like there’s excellent clubs at our school, and many clubs would be popular, I think, amongst all my friends – and they have no idea what [the clubs] are until I mention them.”
Individual candidate Takhmina Dzhuraeva is running for ASG president as well, and will be in a head-to-head competition against Momi this election.
Dzhuraeva is not the only candidate choosing to run solo however; Dustin Boehlke, Emily McMillan, Mackenzie Williamson, Alex Clark, Megan Phan, Jonathan Paek, Vannarith Khov, Jiaxin Liu, Steve Turner, and Dinh Kevin Tu are independant candidtates competing to win positions in the upcoming election period as well.
“There will always be issues that we’ll be fighting for and trying to fix.” said Dzhuraeva on her views of the election process and the ASG.
“Being the president…It’s not only the ideas and the facts of what you’re going to change and how you’re going to change it. It’s who you are as a person and if you care about what you are doing, because you will have a team of students [on ASG]. It’s not only you fighting for all of this, it’s the other nine people.”
The ASG election is fast approaching. On interviewing students around the campus about who they would be voting for and if they would be voting at all however, a new issue formed up against the elections.
“I don’t know how to vote” said Elizabeth Holbrook, a drama student in the E Building lounge.
“It’s pretty simple actually: just go on the BC website and there’s going to be a link on it that says ‘ASG Elections.’ You click that link, you enter your student information just the same as you were logging into BC. Once you put that information in, press sumbit. Then you’ll be brought up to the voting screen. Another easy way to vote is we have a team facebook. If you ‘Like’ [our] page, then right at midnight when the time comes to vote we’re gonna post a link up, and that will lead you directly to the log-in site” Said Momi.
The ASG election will begin accepting votes on April 26 and ends on May 4. You can vote at the BBQ kick off or online at the Bellevue College website.