By Ryan Lee (MIA ’23)

In a close election between seven presidential candidates, nearly 700 SIPA students voted for the 2022 leadership of SIPASA, SIPA’s Student Association. While the winning candidate only received 21% of the vote, nearly 70% of votes were distributed across the six other candidates. Approximately 9% did not vote for any presidential candidate.

The Morningside Post contacted these candidates about recommended priorities and improvements to future election processes, in addition to interviewing the winning candidate, Courtney Manning.

What priorities or issues should SIPASA focus on this year?

Hamna Tariq: SIPASA needs to establish itself as a visibly representative student government. For that, it should prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; campaign for a permanent Counseling and Psychological Services presence at SIPA; and urge the Career Center to hire an expert specific to international students’ legal needs.

Expecting the student body to attend SIPASA weekly meetings if they wish to know the workings of the government or any program-specific updates is, frankly, a bit lazy. Instead, SIPASA should hold weekly public chats with the student body, providing a safe space to air grievances. Alternatively, SIPASA could host monthly open forums to encourage healthy dialogue and debate on campus. Most importantly, the student government needs to regularly update the student body on meetings with deans and other stakeholders. It wasn’t until I ran for a position in SIPASA that I realized the executive board meets the deans weekly. What happens during these meetings? Are the deans aware of student grievances? How do they respond? To represent the entire student body, SIPASA needs to ask what the student body expects from its student government.

Madai Sauceda: As the students' voice, they should work with the administration on the improvement of the facilities. There’s so much to fix. This semester is going to rain more than during fall; we shouldn't have leaking ceilings in classrooms, for example. During the winter, we need more permanent space inside; we don’t fit at Publique, which is also so awful. It seems like they just put random tables and chairs in a terribly distributed space. Most of us spend more time in school than at home during the semester; we NEED better spaces. Which also brings me to Publique’s food service: how can they close so early? It makes no sense at all, they should be open at least until 8. I’m sure SIPASA could bring this issue to the administration too.

I think they can also work on their presence at school. We all should feel SIPASA as a resource to materialize any idea that comes to our mind related to SIPA. I think their main goal should be that everybody knows we can count on them and know they’re reachable. This should be their main goal: listen to the needs because they’re always changing, and remove that feeling (that politics tend to have) that the group in power is separated from the people. We're still classmates, there shouldn't be a communication barrier.

Joshua Fife: SIPASA should focus on communicating university changes and opportunities with students. There is a wide range of ages, nationalities, and cultures represented at SIPA and each group has specific needs. I think SIPASA should play a part in communicating to these various groups about forums, info sessions, work and internship opportunities. There also needs to be an effective avenue for airing grievances with faculty or staff, which currently seems to be nonexistent or simply futile. SIPASA could help by delegating some of these communication responsibilities and supporting other offices and student organizations that also help keep students updated.

How can SIPASA improve future election processes?

Joshua Fife: Most importantly, I think there needs to be better support for candidates. I believe SIPASA can do more to help get candidates’ names and faces out there, offering more than one single debate before election night. There could be more open forums throughout the election process and more clear communication to the students about who the candidates are. This year, our candidate profiles weren't posted on the SIPA website until a week into campaigning, which affected the candidates differently. Candidates already have to fund their campaigns independently while juggling classes and planning outreach events, but the process is made even harder by an inefficient approval process. All events need to be approved by OSA before they can be publicized, and this process takes days that are crucial when getting the word out. This caused a lot of confusion and events had to be rescheduled, which just adds to the stress of the whole process.

Madai Sauceda: Clarity and effective communication, not only with candidates, but all the students. Misinformation creates many problems. Candidates should have representatives that work with the elections committee; it would make the process more transparent than it currently is, and it would also get students more involved in it. At the end of every election process, SIPASA should do an inquiry asking for feedback. With time, every process needs improvement. It is the most natural thing to have feedback before repeating it, and this opportunity should be open for the whole SIPA community, not only the people that were involved in the process.

Hamna Tariq: As with any elections, there is room for improvement. SIPASA is no different. Firstly, instead of continuing with an inherently unfair first-past-the-post* election system that elects candidates with less than the majority vote, SIPASA should consider ranked-choice voting. The technical complications associated with changing the archaic voting system should be addressed well before the elections.

Additionally, SIPASA needs to properly and meticulously lay out its campaigning rules. The rules were somewhat vague and did not address some common campaigning strategies. There wasn’t much structure to the whole system, which caused unnecessary concern. Most importantly, SIPASA should clarify its decision-making processes to candidates. Speaking from personal experience, I was not given my second-choice option after the presidential elections. When asked why, instead of being referred to a clause in the constitution or a reasonable answer to my very reasonable question, I was asked to email the deans. If I had to involve the deans, why would I ask the student government in the first place? It did not seem like a merit-based decision or I would have been told that I did not have the qualifications. Additionally, the former SIPASA board decided to reject my application, not the current one that I would have worked with. The unnecessarily exhausting back-and-forth discourages students from running for positions and questions the legitimacy of the organization. It is important to clarify that this is not a comment on individual members, but on SIPASA’s general organizational structure.

*In a first-past-the-post voting system, the candidate who receives the most votes wins, even if the candidate receives less than 50%.

Editor’s Note: Three candidates did not respond to a request for comment.