The presidential and vice presidential elections may seem contentious this year, but the greater battle may lie in the Central Student Government representatives election.

Out of the 58 LSA candidates running for CSG representative, LSA students can choose and rank 21 representatives in order of preference.

The two biggest parties, youMICH and forUM, are running over 20 LSA candidates each. Not far behind in size, the Defend Affirmative Action Party will be running 16 prospective candidates. One candidate will be running to represent momentUM.

Since youMICH has run several of its current members in previous elections, LSA sophomore Laurel Ruza, youMICH chair, said the party primarily looked within its own organization for prospective representatives. After choosing some candidates from within the organization, youMICH sought additional student leaders on campus who it believed “really wanted to make a change on campus,” Ruza said.

“We reached out to people who cared about student government, cared about student issues, anybody that we saw would be a great asset to student government in order to improve campus,” Ruza explained.

In contrast, Public Policy senior Alexander Lane, forUM’s communication director, said his party's strategy involved seeking candidates from the general student body.

“We were the only party that had an open application process,” Lane said. “We made sure that our application was available on our website so people could apply online — that’s how we’re different.”

Lane admitted that forUM’s political views are more liberal than those of other parties, he said the party would run members of the University’s chapters of both the College Republicans and College Democrats as candidates.

Lane said though students would have a tendency to vote for the candidates whose names were more largely recognized on campus, he hopes that the candidates elected would be the ones with the greatest vision for the progression of the University, not recognition.

“We think we have the better ideas, but there are a lot of decent candidates running for other parties too,” Lane said. “We think we’ve worked harder on our ideas, and we think that they are more comprehensive.”

momentUM will be running only one LSA representative in this election cycle.

“Since this is our first year, we’ve decided to start off small and work our way up,” explained Riethmiller, the party's chair. “I think we are a little bit more accessible, and our goals and our platforms goes more along with everyone’s needs.”

Though she admires the other parties’ platforms, Reithmiller said momentUM’s platforms will resonate more with the student body and will be more applicable to a broader spectrum of University students.

“We have not met a single LSA student who does not need more printing,” Reithmiller said of their platform to increase the number of allocated printing pages for LSA students.

She said forUM's idea to have a student representative on the Board of Regents would be great but logistically impossible.

Although Ruza voiced her support for the youMICH candidates and praised their successes as student leaders, she said she hopes that students will rank and vote for the candidate that they feel best supports their needs.

“I really believe that students should take a moment and check out each student's platform,” Ruza said. “I think they should vote on ideas, and they should vote on who they think is going to represent them best.”

—Follow Amrutha Sivakumar on Twitter at @xamrutha and Follow The Institution on Twitter at @TMDInstitution.