Last year, Michigan State University’s undergraduate student body voted to popularly elect its president. This year, the undergraduate student government is trying to overturn that decision.
Its reasoning?
Time.
The Associated Students of MSU argue that they still need to figure out how to switch from a parliamentary system to a popular election system for presidential elections. The current deadline for that task — set by last year’s government — is spring 2026. They now say that’s too soon.
The reason ASMSU is not able to meet that deadline, however, has come under fire ever since it was announced that a proposal to repeal last year’s referendum would be on this year’s ballot. That’s because the student government’s inability to meet the deadline is a result of low attendance at the meetings for the committee tasked with planning implementation, the president told The State News earlier this week.
Former members say that reason’s not good enough. They also dispute the validity of nearly every aspect of ASMSU’s implementation process: how to amend the constitution, who should be able to run for president, and if the committee to plan implementation should — and does — even exist.
The proposal on the current ballot, open through April 6, they say, is also flawed, as are the methods ASMSU is using to market it. One alum said the proposal is misleading. Another former representative — who emailed large swaths of the student body last week urging them to vote no on the proposal — said the proposal’s marketing is biased.
ASMSU members have pushed back on nearly all of those claims with their own rationales.
The ongoing debate is full of technicalities and internal logistics that are confusing to any outsider. But what these arguments really hinge on, it seems, is that despite last year’s student body voting in favor of the change to a popular election system, current members “just don’t care,” said one of the few representatives engaged in the process.
History of the proposal
Currently, most positions in the Associated Students of MSU’s Office of the President, including the position of president, are elected through a parliamentary procedure. The parliament is composed of ASMSU’s General Assembly representatives.
In the 61 years ASMSU has existed, there has never been a popular election for its president. A bill passed by the GA last year aimed to change that. It proposed a popular election system in which the entire undergraduate population could vote for a president. During discussion of the bill, questions arose regarding when it would go into effect. They settled on spring 2026.
After this bill passed, it was put on the ballot as a proposal in the spring 2024 election, where it was voted into effect by the student body.
At the start of fall semester, a few months later, the GA voted to establish an Ad Hoc committee tasked with determining how to implement the popular election.
This committee was short-lived, however, as low participation among GA representatives meant the committee could not meet quorum — meaning that it could not officially conduct business.
Due to this lack of participation, the GA passed a bill in February to put a new referendum on this year’s ballot for the student body to vote on. This time, the referendum would repeal the 2024 referendum in which the student body voted for a popular system.
It’s currently listed as Proposal 2 on the ballot that closes Sunday.
Legitimacy of the committee
Former ASMSU representative and MSU alum Shaurya Pandya worked on the 2024 referendum to implement a popular election and has taken issue with how ASMSU has handled it since his graduation.
First, Pandya said there is misleading information about the proposal on the ballot.
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According to the ballot, “the committee dedicated to researching this process has deemed that there is no evidence to indicate that removing the current parliamentary system and replacing the process with a popular vote will foster greater student body involvement.”
Pandya takes issue with this claim, as he said that ASMSU has never run a direct presidential election and hasn’t done anything to try.
“There’s no evidence saying that it wouldn’t work; there’s no evidence saying it would work,” Pandya said.
By saying there is no evidence that a popular vote would improve engagement, Pandya said the proposal leads voters to believe it’s not possible to have a democratic system that engages students more.
But Pandya also takes issue with the committee itself, which he argues does not exist, citing the bill that created the current referendum. That bill, he argues, says the committee was dissolved.
The bill says that “due to only three General Assembly Representatives having interest, this committee was unable to officially form.” As a result, the vice president of internal affairs organized biweekly discussions for those few representatives and members of the Office of the President to begin the process of research and implementation, it says.
The ballot proposal’s claim that each member of the “committee dedicated to researching and this new procedure has unanimously agreed in favor of stopping any further implementation of this process moving forward” is also misleading, he said, since no such committee exists.
Pandya also argued there was no need for the Ad Hoc committee to exist in the first place. ASMSU’s existing policy committee was equipped to have discussions on the new voting system, he said.
Another former ASMSU representative and alum who worked on the referendum from last year, Kirthi Krishaan, agreed that the discussions could have gone to the policy committee.
However, two current ASMSU representatives who introduced the bill to the GA that implemented the current referendum, Christian Allmand and Jaiden Higgins, disputed Pandya’s arguments.
They disagreed with Pandya’s argument that implementation should’ve gone to the policy committee. Allmand said it would be irresponsible to bring a drastic change directly to the policy committee without proper discussion.
“If we’d have met quorum, there would have eventually been a bill that would have gone to the policy committee to be discussed,” Higgins said.
They also said the Ad Hoc committee does, in fact, exist, regardless of its informal nature.
“I don’t want to mistake informal with unproductive,” Allmand said. “We did take it very seriously, and we thought about this question very hard.”
There was a genuine effort to advertise the committee and argue its importance to the GA, Allmand said.
Why didn’t people show up then?
Higgins said most of the people who worked on and passed the 2024 bill have graduated, and most current members of the GA do not hold interest in it.
“They just don’t care,” Allmand said. “It’s very hard to convince them to even show up to the committees that they’re supposed to be involved in. It’s just a sad reality. People have their own lives.”
Higgins added that, to him, what’s more important is “that people met and thought about this seriously and considered the ramifications” of the system change.
Logistics of implementation
Pandya said ASMSU does not need to make massive changes to implement a popular election system.
It would only require the current popular voting system for GA elections to be edited to include the president, he said, in addition to the passing of a bill by the GA that amends the constitution to reflect this.
“They’re saying that this process is going to be rushed, but there’s no new technology that they necessarily need,” he said.
But Le said ASMSU would have to change language within its code of operations and constitution to reflect such a change, and that would have to be voted on by the student body as part of another referendum.
“We only have the potential to have two elections per academic year: one in the fall semester, one in the spring semester,” he said. “So we would have to try to organize all of those amendments before an election happens.”
Higgins said there are several factors that need to be considered before the 2024 proposal is fully implemented: the voting system they would use, how this system would work, how many votes a candidate needs to get on the ballot and requirements to run.
“The requirements of a brand-new election for this position will be very different from the requirements of existing elections for general assembly representatives,” Higgins said.
Another large concern among ASMSU is voter turnout, as only 3% of eligible voters participated in last year’s election.
Higgins said if a popular election was held, only a small portion of the student body would vote, and therefore a change would not make much of a difference. The current ballot expresses this same sentiment.
But Zaaki Mandwee, a former ASMSU representative and Lyman Briggs senior who ran for ASMSU president in the 60th session, told The State News that a popular election might actually increase student turnout and engagement with the organization.
Mandwee is the representative who emailed the student body last week to urge them to vote “no” on the current proposal. In that email, he said the proposal “is an effort to reverse that progress and take power away from students like you.”
Another concern among representatives is candidates’ competency. An ASMSU president must be familiar with the organization and understand how to manage the various departments, Allmand said. A rushed system may compromise the organization and potentially elect someone who lacks competency, he added.
“We felt like that was something that not only ASMSU didn’t deserve, but the student body didn’t deserve,” Allmand said.
Mandwee argued against that too. He said presidential elections should not be restricted to a small group of representatives, regardless of small voter turnout among the student body.
“That’s not how democracy works,” he said. “Either you believe in democracy, or you don’t believe in democracy. Anybody is allowed to run for any position that they want.”
These factors were not included in the 2024 bill proposing a popular election — though they almost were.
During the discussion surrounding the initial bill in 2024, an amendment was proposed by then-Vice President of Government Affairs Devin Woodruff that outlined a list of requirements to run. But the amendment was not included in the final bill.
Without that, the people left this year to work on implementing popular elections had too many questions and too few people to meet the spring 2026 deadline, Allmand said.
“We wanted to take our time and get the students of MSU something that we really believed in, that would help ensure representation in our student body president,” he said, adding that negative consequences could also affect the student organizations that ASMSU works with.
However, Mandwee said needing more time is not a valid reason for postponement and that the deadline is more than achievable.
“ASMSU should meet that deadline, because that is what they promised the student body,” he said.
The proposal’s marketing
Mandwee also took issue with how the proposals are being marketed on ASMSU’s official Instagram page.
A post advertising the election includes information about the three proposals on this year’s ballot. It tells students to “VOTE YES ON PROPOSAL 1, 2, 3.”
“The organization is supposed to be unbiased and non-partisan,” Mandwee said. “They’re supposed to tell people to go and vote, but not what to vote for or whom to vote for.”
Le admitted the post could have been better phrased but emphasized that its initial goal was to explain what would happen if students voted yes on the proposals.
That post now has over 40 comments from students upset about the proposal.
The Young Communist League student organization has also been vocal in its opposition via an Instagram post to its almost 900 followers.
“ASMSU wants to prevent students from voting for President, a NO vote will allow students to directly elect the President and make ASMSU democratic,” the post said.
But, Allmand said he wants students to understand that ASMSU does not want presidential elections to be parliamentary — it’s just a matter of time.
“We don’t want that at all,” he said. “We are genuinely trying to find ways to get to this. It’s really a referendum about giving us an extension in time to make a wiser decision. We just didn’t know that at the time of writing the bill that 2026 was not enough time.”
