Whether it’s to buy flyers or pizza to give out to potential voters, Missouri Students Association presidential slates raise thousands of dollars to spend on campaigning every year. This year alone, the now-defunct Josh Stockton/Shruti Gulati slate said its budget was $1,500, the Tori Schafer/Riley de Leon slate reported a budget of $1,800, and the Nathan Willett/Payton Englert slate raised just over $5,000 through a GoFundMe page.
The biggest problem with these huge campaign budgets is that the student body doesn’t know where the money comes from or where it goes. The MSA Board of Elections Commissioners requires slates to report donations above $100, but everything else remains a mystery. Students also don’t know how much money candidates are paying out-of-pocket for their campaigns or how slates are spending their money.
For the sake of transparency with the student body, the BEC should change its handbook to require slates to report all campaign donations and spending to the board. Slates should be required to show where their donations are coming from, and what they are spending those donations on. Candidates regularly make transparency within MSA a major point of their platforms, but they need to start with their own campaign budgets.
Tracking donations should include individual contributions as well. Some individual donations, including two $1,000 donations to the Willett/Englert campaign, make up a sizable portion of a slate’s budget. In this case, this could only be known by students if they looked on the campaign’s GoFundMe page — but not all slates have public fundraising pages.
This level of transparency would not only hold slates accountable for where donations are coming from, but would also allow people who are donating — and the student body — to see whether their money is being spent effectively.
The BEC passing rules to support campaign transparency would allow students to see how much money candidates are spending to buy their vote. If students will eventually be paying the salaries of the winning candidate, we should know how much they are spending to get in office.
