During the spring 2025 Graduate Student Assembly election, only 3.9% of UTD graduate students turned out to vote, marking the single lowest recorded voter turnout since GSA formed in 2018.
Dean of Graduate Education Juan González said in a statement on GSA’s website that GSA is meant to serve as the representative body for all graduate students at UTD. GSA has the power to appoint students to university-wide committees that help draft and change policy for the entire campus, appoint students to supervisory positions at the UT System level and determine how $55,000 in student fees are used each year. Despite this power and institutional support, GSA’s most recent elections were decided by 316 graduate students out of the over 8,000 graduate students attending UTD in fall 2024.
Vishva Patel, the president of GSA during academic year 2024-25 and now a UTD alumnus, said that low voter turnout was not uncommon for GSA, and that the switch away from online voting impacted how easily graduate students could engage with the electoral process.
“Like Student Government, GSA used to do [elections through] an email link that we used to send to all the students,” Patel said. “But this year we wanted to give the students that feeling of, ‘Oh, this is like a real election.’ You come over, you swipe your Comet Card, we verify you, and you have a voting booth where you go and vote for yourself.”
GSA was created in 2018 as a joint effort by the Office of Graduate Education and the Orbit Initiative, a program that began the same year to support new, transfer and graduate students. From 2018 to 2024, all GSA elections were conducted via mass emails sent out to the entire graduate student body. The first public election results were released after the 2024 election. Patel said that the 2024 results, with over 2,000 total votes, stood out as a major outlier when it came to typical GSA election turnout and that previous years typically had anywhere between 1,200 to 1,400 total votes.
On top of the switch to in-person elections and the associated crash in voter turnout, GSA also fundamentally changed how it is structured as a representative body. Patel said that prior to the 2025 election, each school was awarded one representative seat for every 500 graduate students enrolled in that school. In 2024, JSOM accounted for 58% of the graduate student body and 50% of the GSA’s school liaison positions. With the 2025 restructuring, JSOM now accounts for only 23.1% of the GSA’s liaison position while representing 54.3% of the graduate student body.
Patel said this change was motivated by students complaining that during the 2024 election, too many candidates pressured people into voting for them, and that JSOM had too much sway over how GSA operated. Patel said that when JSOM had 58% of the liaison seats, their representatives working together could overrule or ignore any efforts made by the smaller graduate populations of the other schools in GSA.
“We saw that having more representatives made no difference to the amount of work liaisons had to do because the schools with few representatives had to do the same work as those with many,” Patel said. “To avoid small schools being overburdened, we wanted a shift. When everyone has an equal number of seats, we’ll still have an equal number of votes during the meetings. If you want to have some kind of things passed through, you don’t have to worry about just one school dominating the meeting.”
Because of the restructuring, each school except for Interdisciplinary Studies now gets three liaison seats each for a total of 18 liaisons. Seven liaison candidates ran entirely unopposed in this year’s election and thus automatically won their school liaison positions. ECS and JSOM were the only schools with contested liaison races. Two liaison seats for the BBS school are vacant since only a single BBS student ran this year, and no BAHT students ran, leaving all three positions unfilled.
The low voter turnout, vacant seats and lack of competition in its races that GSA currently faces is not a new issue for UTD’s representative bodies. A Sep. 19, 1983 issue of UTD’s former student newspaper The Mercury highlights just how far back these electoral struggles go.
“There are seven candidates who are running unopposed,” a front-page article in the paper said. “Despite last-minute efforts to find interested students, there are nine seats left open. Eight of these are graduate seats.”
With 37% of the vote, Yash Thakkar was elected the newest president of GSA. Thakkar began his term May 1, 2025. Patel said that no runoff was called despite no candidate crossing the 40% threshold because a last-minute dropout from the election made it so that Thakkar crossed the 40% plurality needed to avoid a runoff. Patel declined to comment as to who dropped out and GSA did not indicate which candidates dropped out in its election results Instagram post. Thakkar did not respond for comment regarding his election win.
Patel said that he hopes future administrations can make the elections more accessible to students by specifically outlining the responsibilities of each role.
“Our previous constitution was almost a replica of the Student Government one,” Patel said. “But we noticed that that didn’t really work for graduates. Each school is different, some have Ph.D’s and masters, others just have Ph.D’s. The workloads are different, and so many have hectic schedules that we should take into account for these elected roles and the vote process as a whole. Involvement with GSA should not be too much involvement for them.”