This year’s student council elections have undergone many reformations from the previous ones as the present council added new features to the election. The main controversies concern the student movement during the elections, the justice of the actions in different sectors of the election, and the qualifications of the candidates.

The student council added three new features to this year’s elections: the two-round system, an improved absentee ballot system, and the election panel policy. The two-round system dictates that the new student council be elected only if greater than 50% of the non-abstaining electorate votes for the winning candidate, otherwise repeating the process with the two leading candidates. The absentee ballot system allows online voting for KAIST undergraduates studying abroad, who are not able to participate in the elections otherwise. The election panel policy, motivated by its successful implementation at Seoul National University, assures student aggregations the right to freedom of expression at electoral debates and aims to expedite the communication between the student body and candidates.

Despite these measures the candidate parties’ performances during the electoral debates were generally ill-received after providing little additional information from the parties’ commitment pamphlets and prompted the students’ “Hold-Your-Vote” movement aiming to annul the election by declining to vote. On ARA and Bamboo Forest, KAIST’s two main online forums, students debated over whether the movement was violating the spirit of democracy.

Modukkagi-inhyung, the only election panel, spurred much controversy as its members, including a former student council member, aggressively denounced the candidates and failed to remain unbiased after the electoral debate. When a member of the Central Election Committee was found to be affiliated with the movement, the impartiality of the committee and along with the panel came into question by the students. The discontent heightened, as the conspicuously timed change in the electoral laws saved Blossom, a candidate party, from being disqualified; many students speculated that the commission had acted deliberately to preserve the election from annulment.

Meanwhile, the undergraduates generally showed apathy and disinterest towards student politics. The electoral debates recorded a student participation rate lower than that of previous years and the voter turnout rate initially failed to achieve its required 50%, which was closely realized only after an extended voting period.