The Associated Students of Colorado State University met March 30 for their 23rd session. ASCSU swore in their new Budgetary Affairs chair and heard a guest presentation on a dance marathon. ASCSU also debated procedural errors with the votes of confidence for speaker of the senate candidates held at last week’s meeting, ultimately deciding to revote.

Alex Silverhart was sworn in as chair of the Budgetary Affairs committee.

The senate heard a presentation on Children’s Miracle Network Hospital’s dance marathon program on college campuses and how it’s coming to CSU. Dance marathons are events in which participants dance or walk for a period of time, and Miracle Network’s dance marathon helps the hospitals. The Miracle Network Dance marathon programs happen on over 400 college campuses every year, and over 300,000 students participate.

After the presentation, ASCSU moved on to discuss the votes of confidence for the speaker of the senate candidates held at the meeting March 23. The legislative cabinet, Chief Justice Erin Freeman Elections Manager Gemma Buhaenko held an emergency meeting Friday, March 25 to discuss the votes of confidence and determine what action to take.

At the March 23rd meeting, the number of senators present and members who abstained from voting was used to calculate the one-third threshold needed to receive a vote of confidence instead of using the number of ballots received. In a letter sent out by the legislative cabinet, it is stated that abstentions aren’t supposed to be factored. The letter went on to explain that without factoring the abstentions, candidate Correa’s vote of confidence could be placed under scrutiny because it was close to meeting the one-third threshold.

ASCSU moved into committee of the whole to discuss how to proceed in regards to the confidence votes. Parliamentarian Clark spoke about the issue that they didn’t know who would be able to vote in a recount, as they don’t have the exact counts of who voted at the last meeting because it was a secret ballot. They only had the attendance that was taken at the beginning of the meeting.

According to Buhaenko, voting on the second week of campaigning violates the constitution and puts the elections in jeopardy of being appealed to the supreme court.

“The whole reason we’re here is because we had hiccups with parliamentary procedure for the first vote, so now I want to make sure that the parliamentary procedure is in place and followed correctly so that there’s no appeal or no grounds for appeal,” Buhaenko said.

“I think it’s really important that we need to recount because procedural errors happen and I feel like not recounting is dishonest on all of our part, and we need to get it as correct as possible,” said Charlie Williamson, senator for the Pride Resource Center. “We all know things got messed up but we have to try and rectify the situation as best we can.”

The legislative cabinet also voted that an ad-hominem statement made earlier this semester by Senator Correa, which was discussed at the March 23rd meeting, “is a germane and acceptable topic in considering the (c)andidate’s eligibility to run for speaker.”

After the discussion, ASCSU decided to revote. All candidates, including Evan Welch, Rithik Correa and Nicholas DeSalvo briefly presented to the senate again. All three candidates received the vote of confidence.