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ASG plans for senate election with new off-campus districts

With only five days left before a new year for Associated Student Government (ASG), this weekend will be a busy one for the organization as 49 new senators will be elected and trained this week.

According to ASG Executive Vice President Jeremy Harrell, this year's off-campus senator campaign was a little different than years past, simply because he has received enough petitions to fill all the off-campus senate seats.

Currently, there are 21 open positions for off-campus senators in ASG.

In order to be elected to ASG, potential senators living off-campus must have turned in a petition with 35 signatures to validate their candidacy by Tuesday, Sept. 4.

Harrell said he received 25 petitions, the highest number of off-campus senator petitions in his four years at Miami. He attributes this success in turnout to better publicity about elections than in the past.

"This year we've done a lot better about publicizing things and informing students ... one of my campaign goals was to have a full senate, which we accomplished," Harrell said.

For the four hopeful senators who turned in late petitions, they will campaign against each other for the final senator spot on the first ASG meeting of the year Sept. 11.

All senators who turned in their petitions on time have a guaranteed seat in senate, said Harrell.

ASG's Secretary for Off-Campus Affairs Jen House will assign off-campus senators constituency zones. There are seven off-campus zones that senators in ASG represent, with each zone represented by a leading senator, with two senators serving under him or her.

House said the top off-campus senators are chosen based on their previous experience in ASG and leadership skills. Lower senators will be assigned to zones they generally live in or close to.

As for ASG's on-campus elections, hopeful on-campus ASG senators (21 spots are designated for this purpose) and Residence Hall Association (RHA) general assembly representatives have been campaigning since Aug. 31, said Courtney Cochran, president of RHA.

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The final election was held Thursday.

Students living on-campus can choose to represent their residence hall alongside off-campus representatives in ASG's senate, or as a hall representative in the RHA general assembly, a body that focuses more specifically on residence hall life.

In RHA's general assembly, each residence hall will have one representative.

This year is also the first year that general assembly can write legislation that can be passed on to senate, in a process Cochran likens to the United States' two-house Congress.

As ASG's secretary for on-campus affairs, Cochran is excited for this new role for RHA.

"We got big things in the works," she said. "(RHA) is ecstatic."

Beginning Friday, when all the senators are elected, new senators will undergo senator training-a revamped two-day program that will replace the old "ropes course" that didn't get the job done, according to Harrell.

The program is intended to give new senators a better idea of how ASG works before they begin working for Miami's students.

"We're hoping to make new senator training more effective," Harrell said. "Before a lot of people didn't take it seriously and show up, so hopefully this will change that."

Specifically, Harrell said the 49 new senators will go through a workshop on how to draft legislation. Several committee chairs will meet Saturday with new senators in order to assign them to specifics sub-committees.

Harrell thinks this is the perfect beginning to a new year for ASG.

"We're gonna have a full senate," he said. "I think it's gonna be a good year."