THE SANGGUNIAN faces another failure of elections with only a total of 3,001 votes out of the 4,545 needed to fill the Top 4 positions for the 2015 Sanggunian Freshmen and Special Elections.
None of the Top 4 candidates, namely Mawe Duque for vice president, Lanz Espacio for secretary-general, and Christian Dy for finance officer, will be assuming office.
Consequently, School of Science and Engineering Chairperson Luigi Del Rosario will be retaining his position as Sanggunian coordinator in light of the said empty seats.
The Ateneo Commission on Elections (COMELEC) released the official results on its official Facebook page on October 6 at 8:00 PM.
This comes after the 2015 Sanggunian General Elections failed to reach the 3,255 quota with only 3,128 votes for the top positions.
Institutional effort
In an interview with The GUIDON, Duque said that, just like before, not reaching quota is disheartening and experiencing it twice is “no joke.”
“But anyways we have to work with the constraints, we have no choice because the constitution prevails,” he said.
“Now what’s left now is a 7-man [Central Board], including the [Council of Organizations of the Ateneo] and [Ateneo Resident Students Association representative], and as the highest governing body, I don’t know if it can represent well,” Duque added.
Meanwhile, secretary-general candidate Lanz Espacio said in a Facebook post, “I believe the failure of elections is once more a testament to the lack of faith in politics among members of the Ateneo community and in the weakness of our political institutions.”
He believes that preventing a failure of elections cannot be achieved by a single student, as these can only be resolved through schoolwide cooperation.
In the post, Espacio calls on the Ateneo community to fight for discursive and inclusive politics in the university and in the Philippines as well, and to develop a sense of student representation in the government for the advancement of our nation.
Moreover, Dy wants to thank the core support of the student body who voted for him, Duque, and Espacio.
“It shows that while we might not yet be ready for an entirely new Sanggunian, there is significant support for the approach that we espouse—an approach rooted in social development,” he said.
Del Rosario, despite the failure, remains positive. “When I saw [the results], of course it was saddening but my prevailing sentiment is [that there is] nowhere to go but up.”
