The winners of Monday's Student Council Executive Board election were announced by the Board of Elections (BoE) at Tuesday's Student Council meeting.
StuCo said 698 people voted in the presidential race and current Student Council Secretary Manish Gala was elected president. After the first round of voting, Gala led the balloting with 289 votes, followed by 258 for Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium co-Chair Audrey Henderson and 151 for Class of 2003 Representative Chris Cunico. After transferring Cunico's votes, Gala had 359 votes, or 54 percent, to Henderson's 307.
For Vice President for Administration, Class of 2003 Representative Priti Dalal defeated Ethics Board member Ankush Gupta by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent.
Assistant Treasurer Elise Roecker won the election for Treasurer unopposed, garnering 587 votes.
In the race for Secretary, Class of 2004 Representative Jackie Chan defeated James Cakmak by a margin of 72 percent to 18 percent.
There were no candidates for the office of Vice President for Institutional Relations.
Turnout was near historical averages - last year, 653 votes were counted. The election of 2000, in which current two-term Council President Anuj Mittal defeated Stephen Goutman and Saketh Rahm, had 1,154 voters.
Board of Elections officials offered some of the credit for the turnout to the Board of Trustees, who purchased 1,000 Krispy Kreme donuts, which were distributed at polling stations. "It was a nice gesture for the trustees to foot the bill for the donuts," said BoE co-Chair Fahad Khan. Khan explained that due to the fact that there were 1,000 donuts and only 698 voters, many of the donuts were distributed to poll watchers, Hopkins Security Officers and other passers-by.
Upon hearing the results of the elections, the winners said that they were excited at the proposition of serving. "I'm still absorbing it, it's still a shock," said Gala. "It was a tough race to be in."
Gala's victory was made somewhat easier by the fact that he enjoyed the benefits of incumbency. "I voted for Manish Gala because I got all those e-mails from him," said sophomore Helena Orbach, referring to the weekly Student Council e-mails sent out to all students and signed by Gala. "He sounds like a pretty friendly guy."
According to Gala, sending out all those e-mails wasn't bad for his name recognition. "It can't hurt - unless [voters] don't like it," said Gala.
Roecker, who narrowly lost to Noel DeSantos for the same position last year, was nervous up until the votes were announced, even though she was the only candidate for Treasurer on the ballot.
Still, she was glad to finally win. "I'm excited to be chairing the SAC [Student Activities Commission] and continuing the work I've been doing here," said Roecker.
"[Being elected Secretary is] something that I've been looking forward to all year," said Chan.
Dalal was not in Baltimore for the announcement of the election results and could not be reached for comment.
There was some question as to voting procedures when some juniors were asked to fill out the back of Young Trustee ballots instead of voting on the computer, the method used by other voters.
Khan explained that the computer's database of eligible voters was obtained from the Registrar and consequently lists some members of the Class of 2003 as seniors because of the number of credits they earned. Since members of the Class of 2002 did not vote in this election, members of the Class of 2003 who had senior status were rejected by the computer, as well as those who had JCards that were unreadable.
There were allegations that students using the paper ballots were not properly informed about the single transferable voting system, to which Khan said he could not comment since he did not know who was manning the voting tables where the complainants voted at that time.
