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Mike Casas, 42-year-old political science major and student body president, Alyssa Issac-Casey, representative from Chabot College and Wayne Spalding, representative from DeAnza College answered questions with Karrawinds Salters, 35-year-old social and behavioral sciences major and region four representative f[media-credit name=”Jonathan Marinaro” align=”alignnone” width=”320″][/media-credit]rom SJCC mediating the panel.

“How are we able to motivate people to run for office when we can’t get enough people to run now,” asked 31-year-old student Tony La Rosa.

“Marketing. We have to get the information out to the student body,” Issac-Casey said.

“Getting the people elected to be more involved in the students will generate more interest in the student body,” Spalding said.

“One of the things we need to do better on campus is to market us by sending out emails and flyers to get more information out about elections and the student body,” Casas said. “If we elect officers and commissioners during the spring, we will be able to keep them in there for the fall semester.”

About the two styles of governance, Issac-Carey said, “Instead of the board with the clubs sending members to sit on the council we have senators elected from the student body.”

On dealing with elections, a problem which plagued the AS last semester, Spalding said, “We don’t have petitions for people to run we just have an orientation meeting and then there isn’t any crossover when the ballots are cast.”

“We have our director of student life verify all student identification numbers alone, so there is no cross contamination from the petitions and the ballots.” Issac-Casey said.

The student body put the question whether they wanted to switch to a student senate to a vote last semester and the vote was turned down.

“I don’t know why they are bringing this up again.” La Rosa said.

Students are confused over the measure and few have knowledge of the change.

“I don’t know what the difference is between the senate and the AS thing,” said Robert Chleboun, 20-year-old economics student.