Turnout for this spring’s Undergraduate Student Government (USG) elections was the highest since before the COVID-19 pandemic, a Maroon analysis of USG data shows.
Over 1,900 people—about 26 percent of the undergraduate population—voted across Cabinet elections, College Council races, and two referendums, more than double last year’s participation. Nearly 95 percent of voters ranked a first-choice candidate in the executive slate election, the highest participation rate of any individual race.
The Maroon spoke to several candidates and USG officials, who cited strong competition in cabinet races as among a range of reasons for higher engagement this year.
“When you have four candidates, four slates actively campaigning for the cabinet roles, that just necessarily gets people involved,” Elections & Rules Committee (E&R) Chair Jay Love told the Maroon.
No more than three slates had been on the ballot in any election since USG’s 2021 split from its University-wide predecessor, Student Government, which included graduate students. That changed this year, with four competitive slates each getting more than 15 percent of first-choice votes.
“Everybody who was running pushed the other candidates to be better, to campaign harder, to have more clearly defined policy, and to just be stronger candidates overall,” Executive Vice President–elect Aaron Horowitz said, adding that the New Generation Party’s “fantastic ground game” inspired his CORE Collective slate to increase its efforts to talk to voters.
All four slates had presences on Instagram—the Ida Noyes and New Generation parties’ accounts each had more than 1,000 followers—and presidential candidates participated in two debates. Candidates also filmed videos explaining their policies, sat for interviews, and sought endorsements.
The New Generation Party in particular actively campaigned until the last minutes of voting, hosting an event on the quad during the first day of voting and soliciting votes from students in dining halls across campus.
“The manpower this year on a lot of the teams was very high,” Daniel de Beer, the Ida Noyes Party’s presidential candidate, said in an interview with the Maroon. “There were a lot of people campaigning in person, going table to table, [and] on the quad. On election week, it just got people talking a lot.”
William Moller, the New Generation Party’s candidate, argued that, for better or worse, the “polarizing” nature of his party’s platform—which featured support for Career Advancement and “party stipends” for RSOs—increased the salience of the election.
“We were saying the quiet part out loud, [that] this school has a reputation of ‘where fun goes to die’ and we need to change that,” Moller told the Maroon. “I think that’s a polarizing take, but people are engaging [in the election] because this is a take people care about—some people in this school are like, ‘fun goes to die’ is our culture, that’s what makes UChicago UChicago.… A lot of the conversations were less about USG and more about that.”
Moller’s political beliefs were also a topic of conversation during the election. He is the social chair for the Chicago Thinker, a conservative campus publication, and plans to intern at Palantir, a data analytics company that has been criticized for its work with military and intelligence agencies.
“We were being branded as, like, MAGA, and pro-[Immigration and Customs Enforcement], and pro-Israel,” Moller said. “Democracy is a game of telephone—I can say as loud as I want that I’m not MAGA, but at the end of the day, once I’m four people removed, they’ll say what they say.”
Horowitz lamented that some criticism, particularly on the anonymous campus social media platform Sidechat, crossed into problematic negative personal commentary—which itself could have encouraged people to vote.
“High turnout overall is a very good thing and is excellent, but personal attacks are a horrible means to that end,” he said. “I’m very sad that the cycle shook out that way, but I’m happy at the same time that more people engaged overall and voted and did research into the different candidates, which is very good for the institution of [USG] overall and helps strengthen it.”
Still, even with all the attention this year’s election got, only about a quarter of eligible voters cast ballots.
Former E&R Chair Nevin Hall, who had been compiling historical USG election data before his impeachment last spring, argued that this year’s election fit the mold of past ones.
“Every couple of years, it’s the case that there is an outside party that will make a serious run at USG,” Hall said. “They have yet to win, but they do tend to make the run.”
He compared the New Generation Party to the Lyftin’ La Vida Loca slate led two years ago by Christopher Phillips, another Thinker staff member, and drew a parallel between the Ida Noyes Party—which centered its campaign on “saving the Pub” from forthcoming renovations to Ida Noyes Hall—and the Moose Party, a recurring satirical slate formerly comprised of members of the Delta Upsilon (DU) fraternity. DU’s UChicago chapter, now known as the Iron Key Society and unaffiliated with the fraternity’s national organization, counts the Ida Noyes Party’s de Beer as a member.
“We’re talking about [an election] that is published in the campus newspaper several times, there are several debates for it, and it’s blowing up Sidechat, and what we see is basically an uptick of a couple hundred votes,” Hall said. “We’re not talking like we went from low turnout to 75 percent turnout; we went from low turnout to low turnout. Nothing substantively has changed.”
Grace Beatty, who ran for president under the Premium Party banner, said that social media and other forms of campaigning could only get candidates so far. “There’s a big group of the school that’s not on Sidechat, that’s not on social media,” she told the Maroon.
She was doubtful that “a random person who has no relationship to [USG], with at least three degrees of separation [from USG members]” would have been particularly engaged in the election, she added.
Hall, Horowitz, and Beatty all pointed to an opening left by incumbent USG executives as another factor behind the increased competition this year. President Elijah Jenkins, a fourth-year, is graduating, and Executive Vice President Alex Fuentes declined to run for any position.
De Beer and Hall also noted that, unlike in many previous elections, there were multiple slates—the CORE Collective and the Premium Party—primarily made up of incumbent USG members, potentially dividing some of the most engaged voters.
This year’s election was USG’s first to use ranked-choice voting (RCV), allowing students to rank candidates in executive slate and cabinet races by preference. After first-choice votes were tallied, ballots cast for candidates that placed last were reassigned to those voters’ second choices. Candidates were eliminated through this process until one received a majority of the remaining votes.
RCV does not appear to have changed any of the results—every candidate ultimately elected had the most first-choice votes—but it is difficult to estimate what effect the process had.
“It’s a little bit unknowable whether or not, if we did not have [RCV], people would have voted differently or expressed their preferences differently,” Love said. “I’m certainly very happy that we did have [RCV] with four candidates running—I think it’s much better to have that mandate of ‘there is a majority in that last round,’ compared to a plurality or something else that might have happened [without RCV].”
Moller and Hall suggested that RCV could have discouraged turnout by making the ballot longer and less straightforward but expressed uncertainty about whether it had much effect.
Because many voters did not rank all the candidates even in closer races, a small but significant share of ballots were “exhausted” by the last ranked-choice tabulation round when all of their ranked candidates were eliminated. About 15 percent of ballots cast in the vice president of campus life race, for example, were not counted in the final round.
Editor’s note: Aaron Horowitz and Grace Beatty, executive slate candidates in the USG election last month, are staff members of the Maroon. They had no involvement in the reporting or editing of this story.
Editor’s note, May 7, 8:51 p.m.: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the Iron Key Society assisted de Beer’s campaign.
