Voter turnout for the ASI elections last week hit a near low of 9.8 percent, the second lowest rate in the past eight years.

The turnout was also 3.3 percent lower than last year, when 13.1 percent of the student population, 3,471 students, came out to the polls, dropping to 2,468 students this year.

ASI President Eric Guerra partly attributes the turnout rate to the rainy weather when the outdoor polls opened last Tuesday.

The shifting of the five polling booths’ locations on campus throughout the two election days also created some problems for voters, Guerra said.

He mostly blames some of the slates’ late starts to their campaigns, decreasing the competition between different slates.”Only one slate, Unity, was really able to bring out the voters. There would have been an increase in turnout if the other two slates, Vision 2003 and the Home Team, came out earlier,” Guerra said.

Since the slates did not promote student issues as strongly as they had in previous elections in their limited campaigning, there was not as much of a drive from students to come out to the polls, Guerra said.

“Students are more concerned with issues than the spirit of the election,” Guerra said. “If the slates had come out stronger for the issues, students would have been more adamant to vote. The consistent reply from students was that none of the slates focused on issues, just on marketing propaganda.”

Though Angela Gomez, an ASI service representative, said that the slates could not have done anything differently to increase voter turnout, she said their campaign techniques were cleaner than last year.

“There wasn’t a lot of dirty stuff. There was more spirit, this year,” Gomez said.

The highest voter turnout i the past 10 years was in 1995, when a measure on the ballot proposed to tag an extra $10 per year onto student tuition for the next four years to increase funding for Sac State’s athletics program. It directly upgraded all teams in the program from Division II to Division I.

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