Seat allocation for this year’s Student Government Association elections, scheduled for April 12 and 13, includes graduate students, even though only undergraduate students are represented in the SGA Senate.

SGA Election Commissioner Marqueta Abraham, appointed by President James Orr, said she and Orr allocated the seats earlier this semester using official figures from Student Affairs.

However, the numbers Abraham and Orr used to calculate the number of Senate seats included graduate students, which altered the seat allocation.

The SGA Senate does not represent graduate students, even though they were included in the count.

To determine the number of senators from each of UTM’s five colleges, the SGA Constitution requires one senator for every 250 students. When there are 151 students left over, another seat is allocated.

This year’s seat allocation is correct when the numbers are calculated using both the undergraduate and graduate student counts from each college, but not when only undergraduate students are used in calculations.

The SGA Constitution does not specify which numbers to use in the allocation.

As a result of using both undergraduate and graduate students in the calculations is a net gain of three Senate seats that would not otherwise exist.

In the College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, the SGA Election Commission allocated seven seats for this year based on the 1,714 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled this semester. There are only 1,293 undergraduates in that college, which would mean five seats.

The commission allocated four seats for the College of Business and Public Affairs based on the 993 total students in that college, but there are only 886 undergraduates in the college, which is enough for three seats.

Abraham says she was not sure which semester enrollment figures she and Orr used to calculate Senate seat allocation.

“(Orr) just gave me the numbers and we sat down and figured it out,” Abraham says.

Orr says he is confident about the numbers he used.

“We got them straight from Student Affairs, and we double-checked them,” Orr says. “We used what they gave us.”