This sudden switch has raised two concerns. The first is the basic question of student awareness: neither the Stanford Review nor the Stanford Daily has written on this issue as of yet, leaving students with few avenues to learn about the changes. To compound the issue, a voter who looks at the candidate statement for Senior Shore will still see the original slate members listed at the top of the statement – only readers who read into the platform learn about the changes. This is not the fault of the Senior Shore slate – I assume that there was something about the elections website that made further changes impossible in such a short time frame – but it remains an issue.
The second is a broader issue about whether slates are allowed to change their membership after the end of petitioning and whether a slate can run with only three members. A preliminary search of the ASSU Constitution and By-Laws reveals almost no information about the class presidents. There seems to be very little in the way of rules about slates at all. There seems to potentially be a broader Constitutional question about whether petitioning for a slate entails the equivalent of registering a name or whether it is tied to the students who originally composed it. So far, it’s left to the Elections Commission to “exercise its independent judgement in: determining the eligibility of candidates, slates, sponsors, Special Fee requests, and ballot measures,” but we’ll see what happens as the election winds down tomorrow.