The Illinois Student Government achieved its main goal of getting votes out during the midterm election this semester.

ISG was able to increase voter turnout compared to the 2014 Midterm election, Susan Zhou, Chief of Staff of the organization and sophomore in LAS, said.

ISG’s Get-Out-The-Vote Task Force final report stated, “the overall turnout on campus is the highest it’s been in over a decade, and in terms of ballots cast, at least 3.1 times higher than in 2014.”

Zhou said she believes the ISG succeeded in getting out the vote through social media and having students out on the Main Quad to encourage people to vote.

“We worked with a lot of different campus administrators, student groups and then as well as Champion County, the clerk office that runs the elections,” Zhou said. “We did a really good job working with them.”

Alissa Xiao, speaker of the senate and sophomore in LAS, said in an email she’s seen a higher number of committee membership and participation in the ISG leadership.

Next semester, the ISG will be focusing on some of the goals that President Walter Lindwall, senior in LAS, and Vice President Alice Zheng, junior in LAS, campaigned on last year, such as focusing on environmental sustainability, sexual assault prevention, as well as helping out both international and undocumented students on campus.

The ISG has dealt with the allegations of sexual assault against a professor in the College of Law at the beginning of this semester.

To take action, the ISG published a resolution demanding his resignation and sent it to the chancellor.

“We’re moving on towards establishing a process that professors who get accused of sexual assault, and if we find out that there’s enough … evidence to confirm that the stuff has happened, then professors need to start facing real and actual consequences for their actions against students,” Zhou said.

Zhou is working towards providing premenstrual products for free in some of the buildings on campus, and hopes the coin dispensaries will be gone by the start of summer of next year.

Other than administrative goals, ISG hopes to have better communication efforts for next semester.

“Speaking for my experience from not only this year, but especially last year, sometimes the administration will read our emails and then forget about them. So hoping for some improvement on that,” Zhou said.

More communication with the student body is also what ISG hopes to achieve next semester.

“We would like more students to reach out to us with what changes they would like to see on campus,” Xiao said.

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