Student Government did some house cleaning Wednesday night at the Memorial Union by passing an election reform and proxy bill.

The amendments and cuts that were made to the two main bills took up most of the night, but before this, the Senate first announced the changes to some Iowa State campus events, which included WinterFest.

“WinterFest can’t happen because it was originally scheduled for December, and we’re not here in December because of the change in time for the semester, so it is just changing everything to virtual,” said Matthew Klaes, Student Government finance director. 

After addressing the external matters, the Senate began the process of passing one of their two main bills. 

Introduced by Sen. Logan Simonson, the proxy bill was barely passed as it cleared the two-thirds Senate majority vote rule by one. The bill was intended to allow senators to vote by proxy, which means a senator could vote by sending another person into a meeting for them if the senator were to be affected by COVID-19. As the discussion proceeded, objections surfaced as the bill was revised to allow senators to proxy for all health-related concerns. 

“There is no COVID-19 language in there, it’s just whoever doesn’t want to show cannot show up,” Sen. Dawson Weathers said. “I understand we should have faith in our senators, and I would like to think every senator will be the ideal senator, but if that were truly the case, then we wouldn’t have the need for the majority of the rules that we have in the Senate.”

Simonson said while the bill was expanded so absences could relate to all health events, he does not see it being a potential alley for senators to skip meetings. 

“We all ran for election because we want to be here,” Simonson said. “I think we all agree that in-person is so much better. I don’t know of anyone in this room who wants to proxy because they don’t want to be here, and if they do want to, they should probably just leave. I don’t think that is an issue. We don’t have people trying to get out of meetings.”

The last major bill of the night had to do with election reform. After many cuts and amendments, the bill, which took over two months to construct, was passed. Jacob Ludwig, speaker of the Senate, praised the bill. 

“This does a lot of really good things; from the adversarial process to the permanent election code to the cleaning up of certain parts of Chapter 13, this is a good bill,” Ludwig said. “It represents a lot of thoughtful work and consideration. I think overall, this bill represents a massive improvement to our election system.”