After the polls closed last night for the Students’ Association presidential, senatorial and class council elections, a presidential winner was not announced.
According to the SA Elections Web site, “There was no clear winner for President. A runoff election will be scheduled.”
However, SA Speaker of the Senate, Elections Committee Chair and senior Tom Hayes confirms this is not the case.
“There’s not going to be a runoff,” Hayes said.
Results for the presidential election are not on the Web site because of an issue with Information Technology Services, who is responsible for the online voting server.
The votes have been tabulated by the server, but are not automatically published with the other elections due to a feature in the tabulation service.
“We should know the results fairly early on Thursday,” Hayes said. “We don’t have the numbers – the computer has the numbers.”
The Elections Committee could not reach ITS on Wednesday evening to obtain access to the results.
“My speculation is that the program was set up for a mode it was on last year,” Hayes said. “Last year there were four candidates.”
There were only three candidate pairs in this election.
“The current rule says that if there are four or more candidates and no one wins a majority, then the top two would compete in a runoff,” SA President and senior Pete Nabozny said. “When there are three or fewer candidates, the person with the most votes wins.”
A record high of 1,573 students voted in at least one election since April 4, with 1,432 voting in the presidential election.
“It’s the highest turnout that we’ve seen in a long time, certainly in the last five years,” Nabozny said. “That’s a trend we want to see continue in the future.”
Competition between candidates was cited as a key factor in the large voter turnout.
“I think three strong, very competitive presidential candidates brought more to vote,” Hayes said. “The freshman elections were highly contested, and all elections but one had opposition.”
The Elections Committee experienced only minor troubles with other parts of the voting process.
“There were a couple of issues brought to our attention with classification,” Hayes said. “We go by what the registrar says. There was a problem initially with candidates not being able to vote for themselves, but that was solved early on.”
The Elections Committee didn’t have problems communicating with ITS until after the polls closed.
“We’ve communicated a lot throughout the election,” Hayes said. “Minor problems were fixed, and I’m pretty pleased with the way the whole process went and our ability to dynamically solve problems.”
There was also a dramatic drop in the number of paper ballots cast, compared to last spring’s election.
“We only had 11 paper ballots compared to about 60 last year,” Hayes said. “I believe it’s a testament to the smoothness of the election and lack of problems with electronic voting.”
Another difference from last spring is the small number of election rule infractions. Hayes believes more in-depth pre-election meetings were responsible for this.
“Candidates were explicitly told what the rules were,” Hayes said. “The ability to communicate with me during the election process helped. I spoke with presidential candidates about ideas before they carried them out.”
The presidential candidates were bothered with the delay, but understood the circumstances.
“We were all disappointed we couldn’t find anything out tonight,” presidential candidate and junior Michael Guerra said. “This was just an unnecessary inconvenience.”
Presidential candidate and junior Matt Goldblatt noted that voters may feel frustrated with the situation, as well.
“People seemed to get into the elections and care,” Goldblatt said. “As for the presidential election, it’s unfortunate we have to wait a little while.”
However, all of the candidates are not overly worried about the situation.
“The situation at present is an unfortunate one,” presidential candidate and junior David Ladon said. “It’s waiting a day and it’s out of our hands – it’s not worth worrying about.”
While Hayes insists that all elections are unofficial until verified by the Election Committee, preliminary results were available on the Web site.
Representing the Class of 2006 are senators Amos Rosenstein, Michael Goelik and Tyson Ford. Sophomores Sal Amato, Revay Wilson and Ray Watts will be representing the Class of 2007. Gregory Meditz, Daniel Goldstein and Hannah Geswein received the most votes for the three Class of 2008 senate seats.
Three at-large senator positions were available and went to sophomores Gretchen Garcia, Mariangie Feliz and Mlen-Too Wesley II.
Eight students were also elected to their class councils. Juniors Matt Goldblatt, Princy Thottathil, Jessica William, Mike Rothberg, Katherine DelBalso, Emily Augustine, Marc Perez and Sara Wieseneck will form the 2006 Class Council.
Next year’s junior class council will be comprised of sophomores Mike Bozzella, Alexander Pearlman, Rachel Thibo, Feisal Adan, Becky Hayes, Jaideep Sen, Lindsay Dussing and Emily Cohen. Freshmen Gregory Meditz, Brian Poon, Shweta Mahajan, Valerie Tsang, Aditi Kadakia, Bobby Sanborn, Emily Paret and Ariel Gros-Werter will make up the 2008 Class Council.
All election results are unofficial – the Elections Committee has five days to determine their authenticity.
Borchardt can be reached at jborchardt@campustimes.org.
