Correction: Orange Media Network Multimedia Contributor Jarred Bierbrauer’s name was initially spelt wrong. The Barometer regrets this error.

Voting for the 2020 presidential election for the Associated Students of Oregon State University, OSU’s recognized student government will open at 12:01 a.m. on Monday, Feb. 17, and will close on Feb. 21 at 9:59 p.m. 

Drew Desilet, assistant director of Student Governance and ASOSU faculty advisor, explained how students can participate in the election. 

“Students will receive a ballot invitation in their ONID email address Monday morning shortly after midnight, and it will have a link in that ballot invitation email that they can click on and will take them directly to the ballot, as long as they’re a student of Oregon State University [in Corvallis or Ecampus] and not on the Cascades campus,” Desilet said.  

Hannah Kutten, director of Government Relations for ASOSU, said she feels that voting in the ASOSU election has an impact on student life. “The students who are voted into our administration here get a lot of say in administrative decisions. Our president gets to sit on a lot of committees and our vice president gets to be involved in committees,” Kutten said. “If you want to see a change on campus, students are really good at making that happen. If you vote [for] people in ASOSU who you believe will make [a] change, then we’ll have change on campus.” 

Rachel Josephson, current president of the Associated Students of Oregon State University, shared some thoughts on the ease and significance of voting. 

“Voting is a way to directly insert yourself into conversations. You want the people who are representing you to represent you, right? And the only way to do that is if you vote. Voting takes two seconds, you get an email with your ballot in it and you fill it out, read the platforms, it’s pretty easy to catch up and see what your fellow students are planning on working on, what they’re planning on advocating for, and then you can vote for whoever you want to represent you,” Josephson said. 

Josephson also described some of the opportunities that a student president has to create change on and off of campus. 

“We do a lot, we work a lot with administration and faculty, partner with the state and the government, both federal and local and state,” Josephson said. “We work on things from OSU policy, which covers the wide swath of everything, to lobbying, to passing legislation to support change on this campus directly, and if you’re not actively engaged in voting, you’re not doing yourself a service. If you’re complaining about something, there’s something we can do at ASOSU probably to help fix it. So, if you’re not voting, then you probably shouldn’t complain.”

Voting closes Feb. 21 at 9:59 p.m., and the results of the election will be made public the following day.