Endorsement: Slaughter and Schwartz for president

—-In years past during the Associated Student Government (ASG) election season, The Advocate has been known to endorse candidates for election. The Advocate editorial board believes it is valuable to highlight a pair of candidates who are the most qualified or experienced and who seem to best represent the needs of the students.

After sifting through research, conducting personal interviews and looking at responses from the debates, The Advocate endorses Brett Slaughter and Kyle Schwartz for ASG president and vice president.

This support stems from our editorial board’s long-standing coverage of ASG events, actions and movements as well as half of this year’s editors having covered three ASG administrations.

This factors into our decision to endorse candidates from outside the current ASG administration, because we see a need for fresh ideas and a new way of doing things in student government.

While we identify Slaughter as an outside candidate, we want to make the distinction that being an outside candidate doesn’t mean that Slaughter is inexperienced. He was a shadow for the Sandy City Council, thus showing he has participated in local representative government. While two of the other candidates have experience with student government, both with ASG and in high school, we don’t necessarily see ASG experience as a prerequisite to being ASG president.

We’ve previously voiced our concerns about ASG and provided constructive criticism and have seen some improvement, but we’d like to see more change for the better.

Slaughter said during the presidential debates that he first attended MHCC for a term in 2010 and noticed some over-arching issues that students face. He left for two years on a mission trip and then returned to MHCC and found the same issues and so decided to run for ASG president to address and solve them with common sense and with full student involvement, he said during the debates on Wednesday.

The Advocate shares this viewpoint and feels Slaughter is ready. Members of our board have seen three years’ worth of ASG elections and read through three years of election platforms. We see some of the same issues pop up each year, especially from candidates from the current ASG administration; however, we’ve noticed that those issues are not always seen through to the end.

While the other candidates this spring raise similar issues – safety, increased student representation and involvement – they don’t seem to recognize that ASG exists to serve the students’ needs as the students see them, and not needs that ASG merely feels students have.

We see many good qualities in the different candidates seeking the top two student government positions, but believe the Slaughter-Schwartz ticket will serve students best. We urge the other candidates to use their positive attributes in support of the next ASG president, and to work together to help all students.