Correction appended.
This is the third in a series of three articles about each senate ticket.
Combining the experience of two current Student Senate members with the new ideas of an external candidate, Voice is a ticket in this year's senate election hoping to make Ohio University a more inclusive place.
Presidential candidate Jordan Kelley, vice presidential candidate Keyarah Newton and treasurer candidate Dane Hudson make up the executive board for the ticket. Kelley ran for president and Newton for senator at-large in last year’s election on a ticket called Impact, which lost to UNITE.
The Voice ticket has 15 objectives as part of its platform. The top five goals focus on alternative dining options, college affordability, counseling, programming for Friday nights to bring students together from on and off campus and making the campus safer for students.
“This year, we just kind of made sure that we were reaching out a little bit further than we did last year, as well as planning way ahead of time, getting things done, making sure everybody knows what they’re going to be doing and just making sure that we have a great group of people to work with,” Newton said.
Kelley has been in senate for the past four years and will continue for a fifth year, regardless of how the elections go. Nick Felt, current governmental affairs commissioner, is the one who persuaded Kelley to run for president for the second time.
“I’ve served on staff, I’ve been a vice-commissioner, a commissioner and a senator, and I was also the chairman of the Rules and Procedures committee,” Kelley said. “I think all of that experience is really important because Student Senate has a lot of rules that are really hard to understand.”
Newton has been in senate for about a year, and Hudson has never ran as part of a senate ticket before. Kelley said it’s great to have someone in an executive position that does not have as much experience with that part of senate because it gives a different point of view to the team.
Hudson is the president of the Ohio University Fixed Income Management Group, where he helps manage more than $2 million, giving him experience in dealing with large amounts of money, he said. Hudson added that he has interned with three different large companies, working in finance services.
“This, for me, has been a remarkably eye-opening experience,” Hudson said. “It’s what I want to do. I think this is fun. It’s not work. It’s not about your resume. It’s something that I genuinely enjoy and would be happy to do forever.”
The Voice ticket hopes to bring about many changes to the senate body. Those include offering Bobcat Student Orientation in different languages, having a landlord rating system for off-campus students and expanding gender-neutral bathrooms.
“We were very intentional with our platform points. We only have 15, and there were very specific reasons for why we chose those 15,” Hudson said. “There were five of them, the big five, that we felt would influence a lot of students, and the other 10 things were things we felt would really help more specific groups of students.”
Correction: A previous version of this report incorrectly stated Dane Hudson's past involvement with Student Senate. The story has been updated to reflect the most accurate information.
