The Students’ Union’s attempt to increase turnout and competitiveness in the Societies Officer by-election has backfired, with turnout decreasing threefold and only one candidate standing.
The Union re-ran the Societies Officer by-election after its first attempt to fill the position in November 2025 failed due to it not being advertised correctly.
The first run of the election was annulled after the Union apologised for not sufficiently advertising the opening of nominations, but the Union’s attempt to run a more competitive election has backfired as the second election only had one candidate, Jesse Ashdown.
This is down from two candidates in the first run of this election.
The Union emailed students several times to garner more interest in the re-run election, however, the email encouraging students to vote linked to the failed November election. Students were only sent the correct link with less than 24 hours before the poll shut.
Ashdown had also made false claims in his statement, asserting that “I was the ONLY non-Union member at an Acitivities [sic] Zone,” despite Cheese Grater journalists attending all Activities Zone meetings this year.
While the Union did send out the correct link eventually, the failure to properly link to the election page earlier likely caused turnout to be even lower than in November, with only 110 votes (0.5%) being cast, down from 307 votes (1.4%).
Perhaps unsurprisingly given his lack of opposition, Jesse Ashdown won by 91 votes, beating re-open nominations (RON) on 19.
Ashdown said in his first Activities Zone as Societies Officer that he “didn’t really bother” to campaign compared to the first election, given his lack of competition.
He agreed with the Union Representation & Democracy Manager that him being the sole candidate may have suppressed turnout.
The Union’s Representation & Democracy Manager, Jeff Saddington-Wiltshire, said that his team “takes responsibility for the mistakes and the errors that happened.”
He also said that having a second by-election “was a mess to start off with” and is “something that we never want to see again” and that “democratically, it was incredibly poor”.
Saddington-Wiltshire went on to say that this was “the fairest returnable election [they] could have,” and as the Leadership Race (which includes the election for next year’s Societies Officer) is imminent, the alternative would have been to leave the position vacant until then.
The lack of engagement with this election is hardly surprising: last year, The Cheese Grater reported that 90% of students do not understand what student officers, including the Societies Officer, do.
Only 7% of students voted in the main student officer elections last year.
Elsewhere, the Union has played an active part in dismantling student democracy, caving to UCL’s demands to remove the representation role from hall officers.
With the new Societies Officer being elected on a turnout of 0.5%, despite the Union’s best efforts, this election has shown that the crisis of student democracy at UCL shows no signs of improvement.