SRC Results Released; Win for the Left and International Students
Pulp reports on the SRC’s first online election.
After an anxious six days for SRC campaigners, the results of last week’s SRC and NUS elections have been released, revealing a win for left-wing and international student factions.
Switchroots dominated the SRC vote, receiving a total of 11 of the 35 councillor spots. Penta also did well, with 6 spots. New international student faction Phoenix secured 3 seats on Council. Unity (Labor Right) improved on last year’s result with 4 councillors. Pump (Labor Left) may be disappointed with only two, including Divorced Dads for SRC which was run by NLS member Hektor Vineberg. The Liberals - running under Time and Colleges for SRC - did worse than last year’s 5 spots, securing only 4 representatives to council. Engineers for SRC’s first foray into student politics paid off, with a solid 3 Councillors. Left Action (SAlt) secured 1 councillor.
Councillors by faction.
NUS delegates by ticket (n.b. ticket does not always correspond to faction)
USyd’s delegates to the National Union of Students’ National Conference will be current President Liam Donohoe (Grassroots), Shreyaa Sundararaghavan (NLS), Angelina Gu (Unity), Lily Campbell (SAlt), Meredith Eicherly (Unity), Maia Edge (Liberal), and Jack Mansell (SAlt). Grassroots has previously stayed out of the NUS race, but two candidates, Liam and Meredith, were successfully elected from its NUS ticket ‘Power for NUS’, This may signal greater involvemen in the NUS from the faction in future years.
4601 students registered to vote, with 3303 voters actually voting. 3164 votes were cast for the SRC and 2185 were cast for NUS. This represents a lower turnout than last year, which is unsurprising given minimal in-person campaigning and the confusion over online voting. Students voted from around the world - 284 votes (8.5% of the vote) were cast from outside of Australia, largely in China. The quota for the election was 88, with nine candidates breaking quota.
Several of the candidates to break quota are also running for USyd Senate, and will likely be pleased with this result. Anne Zhao (Penta) received a massive 303 votes, while Cole Scott-Curwood (Engineers for SRC) got 100 votes.
Although the composition of the 93rd SRC has been determined by this vote, RepsElect will be held later this year to determine who receives the Council’s Office Bearer positions. It looks likely that - like last year - the Left will dominate this process, forming a large voting bloc between left-wing and international student factions.
The SRC’s first online election was not without significant hiccups. Many students were greeted with an empty email instead of a voting link last Tuesday morning, with SRC Electoral Officer slow to rectify the issue. Eventually, over a day later, students received a working voting link. The election was extended by two days and voters were permitted to register until voting ended, despite initial rules to the contrary.
Swapnik Sanagavarapu won the Presidential election unopposed last month, with Bloom for Honi taking out Honi editorship by default as well. Sanagavarapu is the second SRC President hailing from Switchroots in two years. It now appears likely he will be supported by another left-wing majority on Council.
The full list of 2021 Councillors is:
Margaret Thanos
Riley Vaughan
Emily Storey
Oscar Chaffey
Ben Jones
Ibrahim Taha
Matthew Carter
Liam Donohoe
Zeyu He
Siyao (Melaine) Liu
Haoyu Wang
Priya Gupta
Matthew Harte
Tianyue Chen
Lauren Lancaster
Swapnik Sanagavarapu
Kristina Sergi
Sarah Halnan
Shanhua Zhou
Thomas Williams
Isabella D'Silva
Lei Yao
Mary Khoury
Grace Hu
Jayfel Tulabing-Lee
Drew Beacom
Lilian Campbell
Cole Scott-Curwood
Varsha Yajman
Hektor Vineburg
Hamish McFarlane
Kristin Miao
Anne Zhao
Zhengjie Fei
Qingchun Meng