The Student Association Senate will move its election from the fall semester to the spring to increase voter turnout.

The SA Senate election will coincide with the 2016 SA executive election in the spring. There will be a final SA Senate election in the fall.

The SA Senate made the change with a 35-2 vote at its April 26 meeting, as it approved a bill authored by SA Senate Speaker Dillon Domke and SA Deputy Speaker Robert Kreml. Kreml and Domke gave a presentation of their research supporting the election date change at the SA Senate meeting.

Both Domke and Kreml researched 17 schools and found schools with only one election in the spring had a higher voter turnout then those with elections in the fall and spring. Texas A&M, which has close to 30,000 more students than NIU, garnered a voter turnout of 13,628 in a single election, according to Domke and Kreml’s presentation.

Part of the reason for the merging of the election was to increase the voter turnout for SA Senate elections, Domke said. The turnout for the spring elections tends to be higher than that of the fall, Domke said.

“In comparison [to the fall election], the new directors are taking office, the new administration is just getting in and the Senate hasn’t met,” Domke said. “So there’s not really a lot of activities and things going on to kind of publicize the SA.”