The Student Association bounced back with nearly a slate full of candidates for the senate elections despite promotional mistakes, SA President Rob McCormack said Tuesday.

The elections were supposed to be held last week, but the SA decided to have the election today and Thursday to find more candidates, McCormack said.

He said short term problems with hostile candidates and bad press when the original date was cancelled should be negated by the long term benefits of allowing an extra week.

“Overall, we decided that if we were going to do this, we would do it right and have a larger group of candidates,” he said.

McCormack said he tried to reach out to all groups and invite them to elections, but he said he was not sure of the diversity he intended to have represented.

“I think the fact that we have 40 official candidates is very good,” he said.

SA Vice President Tanya Smith said she feels the SA did get a more diverse group of individuals.

“Overall the number of candidates in the election have doubled,” she said.

Smith said she thinks the new senators will bring enthusiastic and energetic ideas.

“I expect them to come to the table with ideas, open minds and enthusiasm,” she said.

Smith said the SA is nothing without strong and committed senators and executives.

“I believe we have a stronger group of individuals because of the delay,” she added.

McCormack said elections need to be evaluated every year to make sure students are represented fairly. He said there might be problems with students in the first and third districts where there are seven open seats.

Although there are 40 seats, there can be only eight senators from each district. Districts 2, 4 and 5 will be more competitive because there are eleven candidates running for eight seats.

But districts 1 and 3 do not have enough candidates, therefore, there will be blanks on the ballot.

“The blanks will be for anyone to write in their name or a friend’s name,” Smith said.

These become known as write-in candidates.

Open seats can be filled with write-in votes or appointments by McCormack, the Minority Affairs Adviser, and the SA senate speaker.

Anyone who wants to be a write-in candidate should fill out a profile sheet located at all of the polling places, said Smith.