The election for Associated Student Government president opened Thursday at 7 p.m.
Ballots are open for all Northwestern undergraduate students until Saturday night at 7 p.m. The election is conducted through ranked choice voting, and voters must rank all candidates. Students can vote on the ’Cats on Campus website.
ASG has access to over $2 million and distributes the money as they see fit. Additionally, ASG passes resolutions on behalf of the student body to indicate students’ feelings to University administration.
Four tickets, each featuring two co-presidents, are running for office. Weinberg sophomore Alan Hu is running with SESP junior Noah Cohrs. McCormick sophomore Nicholas Johnson is running with SESP junior Nur Yalinbas. SESP sophomore JJ Nabors-Moore is running with McCormick sophomore Patrick Eleazar. Weinberg junior Gauri Adarsh is running with Medill junior John Sisco.
All four campaigns were given one strike Thursday for violating Sec. 207.5 of the ASG Election Guidelines, which states candidates must follow rules set by Northwestern and state and federal laws.
Johnson and Yalinbas, Nabors-Moore and Eleazar, and Adarsh and Sisco all violated the section by posting campaign posters on poles, which breaks NU’s display policy stating flyers cannot be placed in these places.
Cohrs said he and Hu violated the section after Cohrs jumped into Lake Michigan in the campaign’s Instagram video series titled “jumping into lake michigan until i become nu student govt president.” Day three of the series has totaled over six million views and more than 100,000 likes.
Cohrs said their violation was because jumping into Lake Michigan “was against city code.” He said he was not aware of this being against city code prior to receiving the strike.
Any campaign found guilty of three violations will be removed from the ballot, according to McCormick senior and ASG Election Commissioner Ryan Beam.
Alan Hu and Noah Cohrs
Hu and Cohrs are running for co-president to be “something different,” according to Cohrs.
Specifically, Cohrs said they are running a joke campaign, with their main policy ideas being annexing the University of Chicago, putting deer on Deering Meadow, banning Jeffrey Epstein from campus and destroying the Technological Institute.
Cohrs said they are running because their campaign reflects a broader critique of the lack of student engagement with politics.
In an Instagram post and during Tuesday night’s debate, Hu said he would resign if elected. At Wednesday night’s ASG meeting, the organization passed legislation stipulating that if a candidate were to resign before being sworn in, their votes would be redistributed to the remaining candidates.
Cohrs and Hu have not previously served on ASG and called out other candidates for failing to act when Northwestern signed the federal funding deal with the Trump administration.
Cohrs and Hu led a group of students to paint The Rock on Thursday, kicking off the start of the voting period at 7 p.m. Students painted slogans including “STOP THE STEAL” and “HU COHRS,” which Cohrs said was meant to sound like “Who cares?”
Hu questioned the real value of ASG at Tuesday’s debate and called out the other candidates for not doing enough and making promises he believes won’t be kept.
“We might seem like clowns, but the real clowns in this room are the people running for ASG,” Hu said at the debate. “The real clowns in this room are the fellow people who believe that this election is a very serious matter because the truth of the matter is that ASG has no power.”
Gauri Adarsh and John Sisco
This year is not Adarsh and Sisco’s first presidential run, as they were defeated in last year’s election.
However, the two said they learned from last year’s loss and have become stronger as a result. If elected, they plan to fight for more representation in the University’s administrative decisions.
Additionally, Adarsh and Sisco said they want to place ASG’s funding into an interest-bearing trust account so that it accumulates interest. They said putting the funds into the account would enable more spending and would not affect the current spending, as they would pull the usual funds from the account during funding periods.
“We’ve seen the impact that ASG can have on this campus over our three years working in the organization and the potential that it still hasn’t fulfilled,” Sisco said.
Adarsh and Sisco said they have a list of actions they want to take on their first day on the job. Those actions include making a resolution stating their feelings toward the administration, increasing opportunities for student engagement with ASG officers and working with campus media to create an Immigration and Customs Enforcement alert system for undocumented and international students. They would also like to make an optional “Know Your Rights” True Northwestern Dialogue.
They expressed interest in working with the Rainbow Alliance to allow queer students to access queer affinity housing. They said they’d like to pair land acknowledgements with grants for Native American students to go to networking events.
“In a time of extreme political pressure, where people feel completely disempowered, where people feel like they’re not safe when they’re walking on the streets, or they feel like their family is in danger back at home, I think it’s incredibly important to know how you can get help at your school,” Adarsh said.
Jeremiah (JJ) Nabors-Moore and Patrick Eleazar
Nabors-Moore and Patrick Eleazar are running what Nabors-Moore said is a “students’ rights campaign.” Their primary goals are to expand and ensure students’ access to information, as well as to implement weekly press conferences to discuss campus news and ASG projects.
Nabors-Moore said the press conferences would also inform students about national news regarding ICE and other events that can affect students. If elected, Nabors-Moore said they want to ensure students know how to navigate situations like deportation.
“Our priority will 100% be for the students,” Nabors-Moore said. “We will do everything in our power to make sure that the students’ rights are protected and are not violated by anyone, anyone at all.”
Another proposed policy is financial transparency to ensure students know how ASG allocates its money. Nabors-Moore referenced Adarsh and Sisco’s experience working with ASG finances, expressing satisfaction with their work so far. However, Nabors-Moore said he wants to push transparency even further by making ASG meetings publicly accessible so clubs can see how their money is allocated in real-time.
As for policy implementation, they said they aim to work closely with the ASG Marketing Committee and communicate with The Daily or Northwestern News Network to organize press conferences.
Nabors-Moore further emphasized his desire to fight for students. He said they are willing to “risk (their) careers” to fight University administration.
“All students at Northwestern have unalienable rights,” Nabors-Moore said. “Student government should do everything in our power to defend them.”
Nicholas (Nick) Johnson and Nur Yalinbas
Johnson and Yalinbas said they decided to run for co-president to “fix the little things.”
According to Johnson, one of their proposals includes changing the bus system to work faster when it is too cold, “so people no longer have to wait 15 minutes outside.”
Johnson added that they want to give stipends to students with dietary restrictions from the money they pay for the meal plan, so they can “eat properly past tomorrow.”
Yalinbas also said they have “big policies” in store, such as creating affinity spaces to enhance campus diversity by using the house that will become vacant on Sheridan next year. They say they want to partner with University administration in the process.
Yalinbas also said that, if elected, they would acquire external funds to create a Middle Eastern, North African and Muslim student affinity space, which had previously been promised under the Deering Meadow Agreement and terminated under the federal deal. She said their goal is to create community spaces where people feel at home, as other universities have done. She cited the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s La Casa Cultural, which opened in 1974, as an example.
As a current member of ASG, Johnson said he has experience talking with the administration to pass proposals. If elected, he said their negotiating experience will help them implement their projects.
“We spent two or three days literally just sending out emails, DMs, all of these things, so we can have conversations with students while we’re in the midst of midterm season,” Johnson said. “And we’re not even the presidents yet.”
Max Turetzky contributed reporting.
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