Results...

Well, it's time to take a break and breathe a bit... the elections results have been announced, and barring a major violation (one that judicial feels is worthy of disqualification) our Board of Directors is set for next year.

The Results:

President Madeleine McKenna
Vice President Eric Shellan
Faculty and Administrative Affairs Jed Bradley
Operations Sarah Round
Community Relations Yong Cho
Diversity Efforts Ben Lealofi
Programming Sam Weinstein
Organizational Relations Jonathan Yan

As I told several people, I expected One Campus to win five seats on the Board. I just missed which five. Jed and Sarah couldn't lose, which is two of their five. Of the remaining six contested races, One Campus walked away with three positions (the top two and Org Relations) and Team Legacy took the other three.

The races were quite close in several races with margins as slim as 60-80 votes.

An interesting trend to note is that the margins of victory were rather high in the President and VP races, but then got very close in the Directorships. Madeleine won by almost 9%, almost 800 votes separated her and Beto. Eric won the VP with more than a 300 vote margin. Then you look at CR which was decided by 64 votes, or Programming by 62 votes.

The key detail here is that the farther down the ticket you went, in general, One Campus votes died off more and more, to the point that the contested directorships almost entirely went to Team Legacy. The one exception being Org Relations, which went to Jonathan Yan who has a rather strong voter base in the Greek Community. This kind of voter fatigue generally means that the voters were not informed and were simply casual voters who stopped at a table, a party, or some other spot to vote for the ticket who was speaking to them at the time. Team Legacy built a very stable voter base that didn't suffer as badly from voter fatigue, which allowed them to take half of the contested positions.

There are three races I want to discuss here now: Programming, Community Relations, and Organizational Relations.

Programming was a very close race, between Sam and Jocelyn. I think both women have very good ideas, but honestly, I expected the win to go to Jocelyn. Sam worked hard, along with the rest of Legacy, and she earned her spot on the Board.

Community Relations, also very close, seems like it was decided by two factors: the Daily's dig at Tunny and a general dissatisfaction with Tunny in the community. The Daily brought up a good point that Tunny had abandoned a key duty, which probably highlighted other missteps or mistakes he has made this year. Also, when it came down to the final round, when Pasha's 1400 or so votes were split between Tunny and Yong, 400 didn't list either, but the other 1000 split in favor of Yong. It took Tunny from being in first by a couple dozen votes to losing by a few dozen votes. IRV is a killer. In the end, it seems this race became a referendum on Tunny's performance this year and the voters decided on change.

Organizational Relations. Neil and Rory both lost, rather thoroughly, so the race clearly did not go to the most qualified candidates. Nor did it go to the candidate who was most demonstrably passionate about the race, the position, and the entities, Nick Booher. It went to the candidate who has the least real experience, who made the most aggressive attacks, and who managed to alienate all of the groups he will have to work with next year. On top of the myriad of faults Jonathan Yan has, he didn't even come to the elections results ceremony. Just like he skipped out early at all of the forums. A good part of success is showing up. Another large portion is communication skills. Let's all hope that Jonathan Yan is a better Director than he was a Candidate.

The last thing I am going to discuss are violations. Elections violations must be filed by 5pm tonight, I believe. Major or minor, the results will be the same. Candidates will likely be fined or required to fulfill some community service hours, if they are punished at all for any violations. Precedent was reaffirmed two years ago that even willing and conscious major violations will not cause a candidate to lose their seat. It would take a violation so egregious that it borders on criminal activity, and I hope our candidates were smart enough to avoid committing crimes in the process of seeking election.

I'll be watching to see what kind of violations were filed, and I wonder how the tickets will defend themselves.