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After 11 hours of discussion between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, the Associated Students Senate voted against the divestment resolution on the table. The 72nd Senate elected to use a secret ballot and saw 13 noes, 12 yeses and zero abstentions.  Over 100 community members, faculty and students signed up to speak at public forum last night, but only 83 actually spoke with generally equal amounts of support for and against divestment. The resolution called on the University of California Board of Regents to divest from companies that profit off of alleged human rights violations by the Israeli government against Palestinians. This is the seventh time since 2013 that a divestment resolution failed to pass, making UC Santa Barbara the only undergraduate UC campus to not pass a resolution on divestment. The Senate will not meet again until Fall Quarter 2021. ....
Carolyn French National Beat Reporter Voting for UCSB’s Associated Student (AS) elections concluded on Thursday, April 22, and the results are in: Five executive positions and 26 legislative positions were filled. Additionally, a list of 33 reaffirmations and five new financial measures were voted on with a 5,122 undergraduate student turnout for the online election. Undergraduate students showed a 24.16 percent voter turnout while graduate students showed a 24.78 percent turnout, surpassing the 20 percent voter threshold needed to validate the results. The undergraduate turnout showed a 4.68 percent drop from 2019’s election, marking it as the lowest voter turnout in the past six years. Storke Party member Avital Rutenburg, a newly-elected collegiate senator for the College of Letters & Science, said that voting declines in the past two years have been caused by off-campus learning due to Coronavirus. ....