The Illinois Student Senate approved a series of bylaw amendments at its meeting Wednesday to improve the efficiency of the senate.

“The changes are mostly procedural issues that we’ve come across,” said Jim Maskeri, senator and senior in LAS. “We made quite a few substantial bylaw changes last year, and these were kind of fixes that we needed to implement in order to make sure the documents flowed appropriately and actually covered the right procedures.”

Maskeri sponsored these amendments. He said he had proposed them twice at the beginning of last semester, and the senate voted them down both times.

“These are essentially the same amendments, but that was back when the undergraduates and graduates were having certain issues, so I think that may have played a role,” Maskeri said. “Now that we’ve worked past those problems, I’m happy that these sailed though because these really aren’t overly substantial, but they will help our organization function more appropriately.”

After the second time the amendments were not passed on the senate floor, Maskeri began work on a new constitution. However the senate was not able to gather the amount of signatures required for the new constitution to appear on the spring ballot.

“Because the constitution didn’t end up going up, I figured it was time to bring (the amendments) back up and make sure the student senate had the opportunity to fix its governing documents before the next assembly was sworn in,” Maskeri said.

The resolutions were passed without much discussion from the senate.

Shao Guo, vice president-internal, said the committee on internal affairs passed all of the amendments to the senate floor with recommendation to pass.

Jenny Baldwin, vice president-external, said she’s happy to see the amendments pass.

“In the past, it’s gone up as one huge (resolution), so it’s always failed for specific reasons,” Baldwin said. “This time he split it up … and I think doing that helped a lot, but I think it would have passed even if he put it up as a big (resolution) again.”

She said the amendments would make the senate much more efficient in the future.

“(Maskeri) has been researching this for months, this has been the third time it’s gone up,” she said. “It’s definitely going to be a good thing.”