Three days after the official nominations period closed, six new candidates were added to the official list of nominees for Dalhousie Student Union elections yesterday.
The elections committee says this is because of nominations forms that were submitted to the front desk of the DSU offices instead of the elections committee’s office.
Sarah Estrin, Deputy Returning Officer with the elections committee, says a student showed up to yesterday’s mandatory meeting for all elections candidates, but the committee did not have her nomination forms.
Estrin says the student said she had submitted her nominations forms to the DSU office front desk on Friday. Estrin checked the desk and found six nomination forms that had been left behind.
No way to verify when forms were submitted
The forms are not timestamped or given any official stamp, so there is no way to verify they were submitted before 8 p.m. on Friday, the deadline given for submitting nomination forms to the Chief Returning Officer, Dylan Ryan.
Ryan says the front desk was not supposed to be a receiving place, but a worker at the desk on Friday told people he would take the forms and then did not pass them on to the elections committee.
Ryan says all of the students whose forms had been left at the desk had shown up to candidate info sessions in the previous week, so their nominations were expected.
Estrin says she and Ryan had been around the DSU office all day yesterday and would have noticed if any forms had been submitted that day. She says that when she visited the front desk to look for the forms, the worker present said no new forms had been dropped off since Friday.
New candidates
By the time the deadline for nominations had passed, it was expected that the race for the executive position of Vice President (Academic and External) would just have one candidate, John Hutton.
The discovery of the front desk forms means there are two more candidates running for this position, Cody Couture and Drina Therrien.
Four of the forms were for Senate seat hopefuls: Ria Guidone, Kevin Hong, Liam Hunt and Maike Van Niekerk.
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