Associated Students’ base fee measure, Proposition A.S., which would have increased the institution’s basic services fee by $10 per student per quarter – fell 443 votes short of passing.

In A.S.’s first online election, 5,348 students cast their ballots on the A.S. initiative. The A.S. base fee, which needed two-thirds of the vote to be implemented, received only 58.38 percent of the vote, not enough to pass.

“[The base fee initiative’s failure] is going to have a real impact on A.S. and student activities this year, Deanna Kavanaugh-Jones, external vice president for local affairs, said.

It will leave A.S. Finance Board, the governing body that allocates funds to student groups, with less than $28,000 for the rest of the year. Previous A.S. boards saw budgets almost four times that size.

“Students are going to feel the effects of the severe lack of student activities on campus this year as a result of the base fee not passing,” Kavanaugh-Jones, said.

Kavanaugh-Jones said A.S. would have to increase the recharge fees; fees it charges affiliated groups in exchange for taking care of their administrative and financial paperwork, which will further decrease the amount of money these groups will have to fund student activities.

“We have started looking for ways to help student groups find funding to sustain themselves,” Kavanaugh-Jones said.

A.S. Executive Director Don Daves-Rougeaux said at last week’s Legislative Council meeting that the election results would be tallied by Oct. 11 but A.S. would wait to release its results until Oct. 14 when the MCC would be able to release the results from its measure. Results for the MCC initiative, which passed with 82 percent of the vote, were released on schedule.

The A.S. Elections Committee would not release the election results of the A.S. initiative to the Daily Nexus as of press time. Daves-Rougeaux said the results could not be released because the A.S. office was closed due to recent strikes.

The Chair of the A.S. Elections Committee and the Campus Elections Committee, James Keenley, released the results to the university newsletter, 93106, which provided them to the Daily Nexus. The official results of the A.S. ballot measure were also not released to A.S. Legislative Council members.

The Election Committee’s decision to release the results of the A.S. base fee increase only to specific members of the public, while excluding others, could violate California’s public records laws.