Bautista elected next ASWU president: election results in

Jake Procino

News editor

The ASWU Executive Council election results were announced Friday evening. Giovanni Bautista (’22) was elected President, Angel Park (’22) was elected Vice President and Michael Burke was re-elected Treasurer.

Bautista currently serves as an ASWU Senator for the class of 2022, works as a Resident Advisor (RA) and is a student representative on the Academic Council. Park currently works as the ASWU Clerk, a role she has been in since Fall 2018. Burke is currently the ASWU Treasurer and previously served as a Senator.

The election was marred by negative campaigning committed by Instagram accounts, none of which were associated with any candidate. This garnered a statement of condemnation by the current ASWU Executive Council and caused one candidate for Vice President to drop out.

The five constitutional changes also passed.

Graphic made by Jake Procino in Canva.

Three of the constitutional amendments change wording in the document. According to an email sent by ASWU Vice President Mary Robicheaux (’21) to the student body, the first two changes “adds equity and accessibility to the preamble” and “adds "promote equity" to the Executive roles.” The third amendment “changes 'College of Liberal Arts' to 'College of Arts and Sciences' to match the recent change in the college's name," according to Robicheaux.

The fourth and fifth amendments change the structure of the ASWU Senate more substantially. The fourth reduces the number of ASWU Senators for each class from five to four. Robicheaux said: “This decision was made in an effort to ensure that ASWU Senators are held to a high standard of accountability and responsibility, and are not only there because of recent non-competitive elections. This is not an attempt to keep students out of ASWU, but to ensure that they are the right fit and maintain high standards of service. This puts Willamette in line with other institutions of our size.” The fifth amendment removes the “Whip role” from each of the senate classes. According to Robicheaux, this change was made because: “Removing the Whip role was part of a re-shuffling of Senate roles that came in part from the addition of the Equity Officer role and from the desire to have the Governing Documents match how caucuses naturally operate.”