For the first time this semester, the General Assembly passed legislation at Monday’s Temple Student Government meeting.
The General Assembly passed, with a two-thirds majority, the bylaws that pertain to the auditor general and election commissioner positions.
Speaker of the General Assembly Robert Kost facilitated the voting procedure, which was met with confusion from the attendees.
“Of course that’s always confusing for people who may not have seen it or heard of it before,” Kost said. “It might have been quite a comical event and we had some fun with it, but it did what it was supposed to. We introduced them to the general format we will be doing in the future because we have a lot of legislation on our docket that we want to get threw and I believe this really helped to acclimate the representatives.”
TSG currently has no bylaws due to the elimination of the senate system, but Kost is writing bylaws for every position in TSG and the General Assembly based on the new structure.
“I write them based on what I believe our structure is and what is has been historically, so a lot of research goes in to that. They are absolutely necessary to have longevity in our government. Without a code of bylaws, we have no structure to what we do,” Kost said.
Kost decided to enact the bylaws for the auditor general and election commissioner positions because TSG Student Body President David Lopez introduced the openings for the positions.
The auditor general oversees all TSG elected officials and ensures they adhere to all bylaws and the elections commissioner has oversight of all elections related to TSG. The applications for these two positions go live Wednesday, Nov. 14 at midnight.
Lopez also delivered an Election Day report on last week’s presidential election.
Lopez began by thanking the attendees for voting and reminded the General Assembly that elections occur every year, not just every four years.
The focus of Lopez’s report was the number of difficulties students faced last Tuesday, including the high number of provisional ballots cast by students. Lopez urged any student who incurred problems to contact him, so he could assist in the solution.
“I think it is important because we need to make sure the same problem does not happen in the future,” Lopez said. “We want to validate that they are registered and can go to the polls in the future.”
Next week, Lopez, in conjunction with PennPIRG, hopes to release statistical data on the number ofTemplestudents who cast a vote in the election.
Laura Detter can be reached at laura.detter@temple.edu.
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