Elections Commissioner Troy Steinmetz, a sophomore, updated the Senate on the status of special fees petition verifications at last night’s ASSU Undergraduate Senate meeting. The Senate also voted on whether to split certain student groups’ budgets into two separate items for the special-fees ballot.

According to Steinmetz, all petitions submitted by student groups were approved for ballot placement with the exception of two, those turned in by The Stanford Daily and Six Degrees: A Journal of Human Rights.

The Daily was denied approval due to one invalid signature that, according to policy, disqualified the entire petition. Six Degrees failed to collect signatures from the required 10 percent of the undergraduate population.

Both student groups have expressed interest in either appealing the Election Commission’s decision or opting to verify each individual signature, Steinmetz said. As a result, he said to the Senate that there is a chance that both groups could be on the special-fees ballot.

The Senate also proposed to change how four student organizations’ budgets would appear on the special-fees ballot in the spring.

By default, student groups have the amount of special fees they are requesting appear directly on the ballot as a single figure for students to vote on. The Senate has the authority, however, to split up the total amount into two line items and allow students to vote on each individually. For example, the budget for Stanford Mock Trial could be divided into one amount for travel expenses and the other for non-travel costs.

Four bills were considered at the meeting to divide the budgets for the Society for International Affairs, Stanford Mock Trail, the Black Student Union and the Stanford Solar Car Project.

Several Senators said that the intent of this separation is to inform the student body on exactly what they’re voting on and give them the choice of what functions of groups to fund. Some members of the Senate said, however, that separating the budget of only certain groups would be unfairly holding them to different standards.

“I feel like the general splitting process creates a system where we’re holding some special fees groups to a higher standard to be able to pass one part of the budget and a second part of the budget,” said Deputy Chair of Advocacy Lauren Graham, a junior. “That’s my biggest objection to it.”

The Senate did not pass any of the bills.