The Office of Assemblies released the Student Assembly election results yesterday, with the elections committee ruling that no candidates would be be disqualified from this year’s elections.
Five of the 12 races were contested this year, down from last year in which 11 races were contested.
In the Agriculture and Life Sciences race, Kate Nadolny ’06 and Jim McCrindle ’07 won. Ali Merali ’06 won the Hotel Administration seat. Melissa Kiedrowicz ’06, Kristen Rich ’06, David Bean ’07 and Tim Lim ’06 all won undesignated S.A. seats.
The winners of the elections for undergraduate representatives to the University Assembly were Christine Tschiderer ’07, Laura X. Wang ’07, Opal Hammer ’07 and Julie Singer ’07.
Merali said that he had mixed feelings about the election’s outcome. “I’m glad that I won, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to make the impact that I would like to, the reason being that I’m the only independent candidate on an S.A. board that is heavily dominated by the ‘Students First’ ticket,” he said.
He also said that he was the only candidate to not be affected by the election challenges, which were filed against both the “SixPAC” and the Students First tickets.
Although the election committee did find that some election rules were violated, the committee found that the violations “did not unfairly affect the outcome of the election,” according to the committee’s statement.
“The Elections Committee held hearings for every challenge and ruled on each challenge based on its own individual merits,” states the committee’s report. “After voting on whether or not to uphold each challenge, we discussed whether any of the upheld challenges … created an unfair environment during the campaign.”
Because no violations were found to have affected the election’s outcome, no candidates were disqualified.
The upheld violations were:
— Postering violations in Robert Purcell Community Center against the Students First ticket, filed by Mazdak Asgary ’08 and Grayson Fahrner ’08.
— Campaign finance violations against the SixPAC ticket, filed by Michelle Fernandes ’06.
— Postering violations in Trillium by Fernandes and Lim, filed by Doug Mitarotonda grad.
— Attendance violations by Ivan Kotchetkov ’08, filed by McCrindle.
— Early campaigning violation by Fahrner, filed by Mike Lepage ’05.
For the Agriculture and Life Sciences election, Nadolny and McCrindle won with 468 and 359 votes respectively. Fahrner and Kotchetkov received 262 and 250 votes respectively.
For the Hotel Administration election, Merali won with 135 votes to Meredith Gillespie’s 115.
In the Human Ecology election, Fernandes won with 307 votes against 64 votes won by Grace Pusavat ’08.
Kiedrowicz won an undesignated seat with 2260 votes, as did Rich with 2241 votes, Bean with 2184 votes and Lim with 1828 votes. Asgary lost with 1629 votes.
For the University Assembly seats, Tschiderer won with 2140 votes, as did Wang with 2024 votes, Hammer with 2015 votes and Singer with 1994 votes. Joe Rudnick ’08 had 1761 votes.
In the uncontested seats:
— Omar Nolan ’06 won the Arts, Architecture and Planning seat.
— Sarah Boxer ’07, Jonathan Feldman ’08 and Neala Gollomp ’07 won Arts and Sciences seats.
— Jessica Ince ’08 and Randy Lariar ’08 won Engineering seats.
— Courtney Mitchell ’07 won the Industrial and Labor Relations seat.
— Ahmed Salem ’08 won the international student representative seat.
— Calvin Selth ’07 won the LGBTQ representative seat.
— Kwame Thomison ’07 and Nina Terrero ’07 won seats as minority representatives.
Archived article by Michael Morisy
Sun News Editor