The Graduate Students’ Union (GSU) late last night postponed today’s planned AGM until Wednesday at 5pm.
A number of key positions on the union’s executive are set to be filled at the AGM.
In an email to postgraduate students at 12.23am last night, GSU President Gisèle Scanlon postponed the AGM, which the union is required to run before the end of the first full week of November according to its constitution.
Speaking to The University Times, Scanlon described the postponement as “no big deal” and said that the decision was made because Mi-voice, the company that processes votes, had to sort through a “phenomenal number of applications”.
Mi-Voice told this newspaper that it could not comment on the election.
Voting for positions will now take place from today until Wednesday. Previously, voting was meant to run from December 11th and continue over the weekend.
Elections for the positions of postgraduate school convenors, faculty officers, diversity and inclusion officer and a research student officer are open this year.
In an email statement to The University Times, Thomas Dineen, chair of the Trinity PhD Workers’ Rights Group, said that “it is unacceptable that the GSU are organising their first council of the semester in the last week of term”.
“It is also unacceptable to change the date of the council the day of”, he said. “Postgraduates, both PhDs and masters students, are frustrated and disappointed with the behaviour of the GSU.”
“They have had no class, school or faculty representation and no GSU exec for an entire semester. This means they have not had the chance to raise the abundance of issues that have affected them throughout this difficult period.”
Last month, this newspaper reported that chaos and unanswered questions had overshadowed this year’s GSU class representative elections, with the validity of the process in doubt after students discovered that anyone could vote – as many times as they liked – in any class election if they had that class’s specific voting link.
In an email statement to The University Times at the time, Scanlon said that the union’s goal had been to “ensure that votes would happen, and that the secrecy of the ballot would be protected”.
A “security gap” had been found, Scanlon said, and the union was now “going to adapt the system so that we adapt verification processes and the secrecy of the ballot”. The union will be “sending out new links with that in mind. That means that there will be a slight delay now of a few days whilst we address this”, she added.
It is unclear to what extent class representatives have been elected since. However, one source familiar with the class representative election told this newspaper that the elections had not been rerun despite the validity of the election process being in doubt.
