The time is approaching to vote for the candidates who will hold the executive officer positions as a part of Student Government Association. This year the race for the executive officer positions consists of a full ballot, which is not typical compared to recent years. There are a total of three candidates running for each of the president, vice president and treasurer positions, according to Michele Irby, director of Campus Life and Events.

The presidential candidates are Peter Jacobsen, Caleb Fjone and Aaron Clite. The candidates for vice president are Kelsey Orf, Grant Hinton and Taylor Kitners. The candidates for treasurer are Clay Dawson, Evanna Jackson and Harman Malhi.

"As the adviser I always like to have contested races," Irby said. "I like when there's at least two people because I think it makes everybody work a little harder for their experience. It gives the student body options of people to vote for, but we've not had three full tickets in a while so this is great."

Anyone who is running for an executive officer position was required to submit their nomination forms by March 11. Some of the candidates have taken on the responsibility of campaigning together this year to increase their chances of earning votes.

"We don't require people to run as tickets and we don't do anything to make that happen," Irby said. "They simply campaign together, if they are trying to run as a ticket. However the way voting works is you vote for people individually so in some cases in past years we have had people win who are sort of cross ticket. There is no guarantee that a ticket will follow the elected."

Expectations for voter turnout are higher than usual for this year's election due to the variety of new candidates compared to those who have prior experience with SGA. The fact that the race is contested gives Irby confidence that it will strike more interest in the student body to cast their vote.

"Usually if there is more than one group running we will have more people vote," Irby said. "Last year we had 818 total votes cast. I would say voter turnout is roughly about 9 percent, 8 to 9 percent. Some years it's as low as 6 percent of our students who actually cast a vote.

"The number of students on campus varies year to year and the number of people who vote varies year to year. We'd always like to see it over 10 percent obviously. Voter turnout is not as high as we would like it to be. In the perfect world it would be much higher than that, but quite honestly it doesn't necessarily differ so much from other public-wide or city-wide elections a lot of the times."

Due to the number of candidates running for the executive officer positions, a public forum will be held in order to give the student body an opportunity to meet and talk with the candidates.

"Student government has an Elections Committee which is made up of people currently on student government who run pieces of the election process," Irby said. "We will do some sort of public forum so if people are interested in meeting the candidates they can do that. The student government hasn't picked a date for that yet so they will be doing that."

The public forum date is scheduled to be determined this week, and voting will be open on March 31 and April 1. Students can cast their votes online through the portal where voting instructions are also located.

"I'm not always certain that the students on our campus recognize how much influence student government actually has and how important being a senator really is," Irby said. "Student government is approached every year to supply students, to sit on almost every major committee on campus. They sit in on everything from the Traffic Appeals Committee to Administrative Council. Your elected officers sit in on budget review, so I think it's very important that students vote in people that they think will represent them well. And when they have the opportunity to meet with administrators that they are representing what students' interests are, and so I think I would say that about most elections for people who run for public office that people should take it seriously because of what these people can do and how they can serve you as your representative."