Lance Butikoefer and Alma Azocar Agurto and are running uncontested for the positions of ASUI President and ASUI Vice President respectively.
ASUI Senate elections begin on Wednesday, April 8, at noon and continue though Friday, April 10, at 5 p.m. Students will receive an email in their student email to vote for ASUI Senators, and ASUI President and ASUI Vice President.
Butikofer is a finance and economics major and served as the director of finance for ASUI for the fall 2025 semester. He is currently studying abroad in the UK, and has also held positions outside of ASUI, being a tutor through the Vandal success program and working with Vandal Solutions as a sales associate and as their executive stagiest.
Azocar Agurto is an international studies and political science major who currently serves as the director of legislative affairs for ASUI. She also serves on the e-boards for the Poli-Sci Society and the Pre-Law Society on campus. Azocar Agurto said that one of the biggest roles she has held was being the Residence Hall Association chairman of her housing community as a freshman.
Butikofer and Azocar Agurto’s campaign, coined “Lance n’ Alma,” is running on three pillars, or core goals, for the school year: support, voice and opportunity. The goal of the support pillar is to increase student access to resources that the campus environment already provides, such as mental health support, while also being available to add on to programs to allow for student success.
Despite running uncontested for the positions of president and vice president, both candidates said that the amount of effort they put into the campaign would be the same whether they had competition for the seats or not.
“ASUI competition has looked so vastly different. We’ll have some cycles where anyone who applies is going to get a seat, and other times, when I first joined [the] senate, we had 30 applications and there were six seats available,” said Butikofer in an interview with The Argonaut. “The best form of competition is competition that centers around yourself… My expectations and what I wanted to pour into this campaign and the roles that we approach it [with] would never change based off whether we had someone else fighting over the seat.”
“But we hope we can create competition for years to come, the healthy kind, people who want it and will work for it. We are not staying stagnat,” said Azocar Agurto.
“During the time when we wanted to focus [on] our campaign, there were so many things the university already had, and I think this relies on how we maximize this for students. How do we increase visibility? How do we create pipelines that are streamlined? And how do we make sure we work with the university to enhance those services?” Azocar Agurto said.
To increase student voice, Azocar Agurto and Butikofer spoke on many different initiatives that increase student voice, such as improving engagement in ASUI and allowing students to voice their concerns about issues that impact them.
The Argonaut asked about Azocar Agurto’s current position as director of legislative affairs, and her coverage of the Idaho Launch and UI funding cuts. She assisted the current president and vice president of ASUI, Seyi Arogundade and Bryant Sitts, in creating a statement supporting Idaho Launch and spoke with the governor about the need for these programs.
“Looking forward to this year, a lot of those things fall into our second pillar of voice — enhancing student voices in both our local and state government. This looks like sending out testimonials about students who want to talk about Idaho Launch. It means keeping really good relationships with our state representatives and making sure they are representing student voice,” said Azocar Agurto.
Butikofer said he wants to expand experiential learning under their third pillar of student opportunities in alignment with the UI strategic plan presented by UI President Scott Green for 2026-2030.
“I feel that [experiential learning] looks best and [is] most well accomplished by meeting with different kinds of teams and departments and seeing, as student representatives, what we can do to work with them to establish new opportunities that they can offer back to students,” said Butikofer.
He said that students want these opportunities, and many offices on campus have the need for student representatives, so his goal is to bridge the gap between these two struggles to find solutions that work for both parties.
Butikofer and Azocar Agurto said they want to make ASUI a workplace, and a community of hardworking, involved and passionate groups of people who deeply want to create change for a better future, not only for their tenure in ASUI, but for years after.
“I know Lance and I are very dedicated, and because we are going to be, we’re expecting people to work as much as we do. We hope that it’s not stressful or demanding but invigorating to see people that want something so much,” said Azocar Agurto.
Josie Adjanohoun can be reached at [email protected].