Raisa Shah will serve as the next president of the Student Bar Association, members of the SBA’s elections committee announced at a meeting Tuesday.
Sidney Lee, the SBA’s Elections Committee chair, said Shah received 53.2 percent of votes in a runoff election last Friday versus current SBA Executive Vice President Kaitlin Fontana who received 46.8 percent of the vote. Cherissa Lindsay defeated Emily Walling in a runoff election for executive vice president with 58.7 percent of the vote, Lee said.
Lee said all the candidates acted in “good faith” and cooperated with the Elections Committee for minor violations of campaign laws, like placing a flyer on a library bulletin board and sending endorsements on the wrong listserv. Lee added that the committee referred a student to the Law Dean of Students Office after a student endorsed a candidate and mentioned the Israel-Hamas war, which “escalated” the conversations surrounding the election. She said the endorsement led to students speaking about the conflict and which candidates represented their views on the subject, which led to some candidates feeling “targeted implicitly.”
Lee did not provide further details, but SBA President Shallum Atkinson said he is “happy to elaborate further” in private if senators are interested.
“The Elections Committee isn’t really the best equipped to handle discrimination and potential issues like that,” Lee said. “There were no formal complaints concerning the messaging issue.”
Connor J. Toth, Omer Turkomer and Dalton Barnett were elected to represent GW Law as senators in the Student Government Association this year on the SBA ballot in an effort to increase voter turnout on the SGA law school seats among law students.
Atkinson said the Law Dean of Students Office will no longer help the SBA determine individuals who request a need-based aid ticket to Barrister’s Ball — an annual formal for GW Law students — after they received “inappropriate” emails from students who were unable to secure tickets for the event. He said there had previously been a mutual agreement between the Dean of Students Office and the SBA to sort through requests to see which students require aid to purchase a ticket to the event.
“We now have to ask ourselves, ‘How will you ever go about assessing who was actually need-based students if you can’t look at students’ financial aid data?’” Atkinson said. “That was simply through a mutual agreement between those groups, but it appears that that’s not going to be the case forward.”
SBA senators initially delayed the Tuesday meeting due to their failure to reach quorum, which would require reviewing any business completed at the meeting at a future meeting. After a 45-minute delay, the senate reached quorum and was called to order.
After a senator left the meeting, the meeting was halted again shortly before 11 p.m., before senators could vote on any agenda items and resulted in a loss of quorum. Fontana adjourned the meeting and rescheduled the remainder of the agenda for a special emergency meeting Wednesday night.
Hannah Marr contributed reporting.
