On April 7, cabinet elections for Grand Valley State University’s Student Senate officially closed and when voter turnout numbers were finally tallied, senators were disappointed by the total, which didn’t even break the triple-digits.

With a grand total of 24,662 students enrolled for the 2011-12 academic year at GVSU, only 980 filled out the online ballot during last week’s elections — that’s only about 3 percent of the student body.

But alongside disappointment, there was little surprise for senators, who have come to expect a less-than-impressive engagement despite a marginal increase in participation during last years’ election.

“Based on the years past, it’s very much normal,” said Ali Zimmer, executive vice president of the GVSU Student Senate. “Last year we had an increase, I’m not really sure exactly what the circumstances were for that. But from the years prior to last year, it’s very much on-par.”

In 2010, 2,000 students voted in the election, and the number nudged up to 2,125 last spring. The decline doesn’t make sense to Zimmer, who compared the senate elections to the presidential ones — a civic responsibility, on a smaller scale.

“I want everyone to vote,” Zimmer said. “It’s like voting in a presidential election, you should just do it.”

In the past, senators have theorized that there is a general lack of knowledge about what exactly the senate does, something that still might hold weight in the wake of the most recent election.

“I feel like students who aren’t participating in senate or don’t know anyone participating in senate aren’t familiar with the system, they probably don’t know why they would vote, why they would support something like that,” Zimmer said. “So they don’t take the time to go ahead and do it.”

The Student Senate at GVSU organizes annual events like President’s Ball and Battle of the Valleys, but Zimmer said the most notable task senate is responsible for is the Student Life Fund, from which the senate’s Finance Committee allocates $1 million among the 328 registered student organizations at GVSU.

“That’s my biggest point of interest,” Zimmer said. “That all the student organizations are funded by the student life fund that we are responsible for delegating. The Finance Committee, they go through funding requests and they determine what should be funded.”

Zimmer said the senate is going to continue to push for more publicity during future election seasons in hopes to get more student engagement. And with the current restructuring of the Student Senate to include a graduate student body before the next election season, Zimmer hopes the senate can reach out to a whole new GVSU demographic.

“We’ve been working on the past year, restructuring the Student Senate to get more graduate student influence,” she said. “So, with that change, maybe in the future we’ll have a whole other body of students interested in the elections.”

Currently, there are 44 positions on the Student Senate Cabinet being filled based on the candidates running in the election and write-in vote, Zimmer said, with six positions that will be held open until fall for freshman and transfer students.

Results of the new executive board of the Student Senate won’t be available until April 19 following elections, but Zimmer said the executive board will have some fresh faces come fall.

“We’re going to have a big turn-around with the executive board,” Zimmer said. “I’m not entirely sure, because we have a few people returning, but there will be more than half of us gone.”

Still, despite the low turnout, Zimmer acknowledged the students who did vote for the cabinet.

“I do know that we have those 980 people who were supportive of their peers, and that’s appreciated,” she said. “But in response to the lack of turnout, I can just hope that in the future that we can just kind of keeping pushing people to take an interest in this.”

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