Charles Russell is a first-year business economics major at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), running for the position of Vice President of Internal Affairs for the 2025-2026 academic year. He currently serves as an ASUCR fellow in the First Time College Student Department. Charles is passionate about reforming ASUCR into an organization that truly meets the needs of students and allows the campus to live up to its potential. You can reach him at cruss025@ucr.edu.
The Associated Students for the University of California, Riverside (ASUCR) acts as a liaison between the students and administrators to advocate for student interests. To properly represent UCR students’ interests, they hold elections every Spring Quarter so that students can decide who should represent them.
They also perform other activities, such as allocating funding to student organizations, planning campus events — the annual R’Gear events — and creating new rules on campus — such as the three-bin rule, landfill, recycling and compost, for high-food-waste areas. However, unlike your high school student government, ASUCR holds real power at UCR because they manage around $700,000 in campus funding.
There are only three requirements to run for an ASUCR position: a minimum 2.0 GPA, a year’s worth of ASUCR experience before taking office and not running for a position while still in that position’s term. This essentially means that most students with at least a year’s worth of ASUCR experience can run for any position.
I was genuinely surprised by how simple it was to run for an ASUCR position. The elections feel more like a popularity contest rather than a political campaign. I expected students would need to be more qualified to run for a position, especially since an ASUCR leadership position represents 26,000 students at UCR.
Yet, surprisingly, there were only three students who applied to run for the Vice President of Internal Affairs of ASUCR. After asking around, I realized why so few people ran for the position: every candidate independently chose the position they thought they were qualified for without consulting each other.
In my opinion, this led to a mixed arrangement of candidates this year where some positions go unchallenged, such as the School of Education (SOE) Senator and First Time College Student Director, while other positions are more hotly contested than it’s worth, including the College of Natural Agricultural Sciences (CNAS) Senator.
I believe the root cause of these abnormalities in campaigns is the ASUCR’s ban on political parties in student government elections.
This ban has distorted the culture of ASUCR elections to become more “cloak and dagger.” Talking about what ASUCR position you are running for before the election is announced is considered taboo. Everyone treats what position you are running for as some massive secret.
Candidates doubt their own qualifications since they don’t know how experienced or qualified the other candidates are. Therefore, most members of ASUCR apply for lower-level positions as they think they have a better chance of winning. However, this causes lower-level positions to become more difficult to obtain than the higher-level positions. The end result is that students have fewer voting options in the high-level positions that matter and more voting options in the low-level positions that don’t.
The lack of communication between students running for higher and lower-level positions likely stems from the political party ban because candidates fear that asking around about positions would be misinterpreted as trying to “cooperate” with other candidates or forming a political party.
Before the 2018 ban, the political climate of the ASUCR elections was a lot different. Political parties ran the show, and most of them were backed by Greek Life Organizations, which killed diversity within ASUCR. The biggest political party of the year was the [YOUR]side political party.
In the 2017 election, [YOUR]side was caught in a controversy of sending out non-competes — a contractual agreement stating a person cannot join a competing organization after leaving a similar one — to members of their party. Then, hours before the deadline, the party expelled members, leaving them unable to register as an independent candidate.
Another controversy around political parties in 2018 was the issue of laptopping. Laptopping was the practice of students in political parties walking up to unsuspecting students and pressuring them to log in and vote for them in the election. The issue was that to vote, political parties needed UCR student login information. This practice created serious security concerns about bad actors pretending to be political parties and easily stealing students’ login information.
However, in 2018, ASUCR banned voting on personal devices, effectively solving this issue. This means that UCR students could no longer vote on another person’s device. Instead, they have to vote at campus voting stations.
While concerns about political parties are valid, times have changed. The lasting ban has had some unintended consequences for ASUCR, especially with election turnout. Since the 2017 election, voter turnout has been on a constant decline, with just 12 percent of students voting in the last election. Now that the political parties have been banned, the issue has changed from overrepresentation of a few groups to underrepresentation of the whole campus.
The current election system is a hassle for students, candidates and student organizations. Students can’t easily determine each candidate’s goals, candidates can’t cooperate with others in order to more effectively reach the masses and student organizations are dealing with tons of emails from candidates who are all individually trying to pitch their ideas to them.
Almost all of those issues could be solved by allowing political parties. They would consolidate those issues by allowing students to run on a single platform with their peers. Students would know what each candidate stands for, candidates could work together to pitch their campaign ideas and clubs could easily assess candidates based on their whole political party. Most importantly, it would hold ASUCR officials accountable to their promises since if they underperform on their party’s platform, it affects their party’s chances in future elections.
But we shouldn’t just blindly revert to the old system before 2018. If we do, we are no better off than where we started. I suggest we allow political parties, but the ASUCR Elections Committee chooses and assigns candidates to political parties beforehand. This would create a system where six or seven candidates would work together in political parties before and during the election.
By adding a narrative to the elections, we can rekindle interest in student government. Currently, most students dislike discussing politics, especially in minor political campaigns like ASUCR elections. Introducing friendly competition by framing elections as a team-based game could generate the excitement and interest needed to bring students back into the process.
It would also turn the election season into a team effort with candidates working with randomly selected peers to advocate for their political parties’ platforms and get elected. This ensures that the elected candidates would have the skills to work and collaborate with their peers, not just their friends. It would also ensure that no one party could ever maintain a lasting majority.
With cooperation returned to ASUCR through political parties, candidates can better reflect students’ interests and work together to address them.
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