A record number of students voted in last week's Student Council class elections despite technical errors that twice pushed back the voting timetable.
The online election system was originally scheduled to open on April 17 at 12:01 am -- the week of class registration -- but due to what Student Council officials referred to as "an unforeseen glitch," it took 12 additional hours before votes were counted.
The voting deadline was pushed back half a day to adjust.
"In the end, I think the election was handled very well," Jeremy Batoff, chair of the Committee on Student Elections (CSE), said. "There was an unforeseen glitch -- no one's fault, really. Relatively quickly, within 12 hours, it was all taken care of and everything was fixed."
The winners were announced at Tuesday's meeting, include Nattapol Pow-anpongkul as senior class president, Natasha Singh -- who ran unopposed -- as junior class president and Sonny Chandrasekhan as sophomore class president.
Pow-anpongkul, who has never served on Student Council before, didn't think being a newcomer would be much of a problem.
"Hopefully it won't hinder me that much when I serve as senior class president," he said.
"Despite the small confusions that went on with the registrar and the elections, I think the elections went pretty well," he said.
Freshman Marissa Neto, who will serve next year as the sophomore Senator for Finance, was concerned that some candidate statements didn't appear online due to confusion over where they were supposed to be sent.
"I think that the initial issue with certain people not being able to vote was handled correctly as far as saying that those votes didn't count and asking everyone to re-vote," she said, "but people have real concerns and its kind of hard for people to vote fairly if they're not even seeing candidate statements, because that's what it should be based on -- otherwise they don't know much about the candidates."
Chethan Mallela, who will be senator for COLA for the class of 2009, isn't even sure if she'll get to keep the position.
"I'm happy, obviously, but again with the whole election process -- I'm not really sure if it's getting contested," she said. "We're just going to have to wait and see."
William Pennet -- who ran unopposed for the position of senior class senator for finance -- is also new to StuCo and plans to, among other things, ensure that the senior class gets a graduation speaker of their choosing next year.
"This'll be my first year on the Student Council, but I've definitely interacted with the Student Council before," Pennet said. "I'm very honored that my classmates and friends decided to [vote for me]."
"The driving force for running for the finance position was that we get a graduation speaker that has been selected through the proper channels as set up by the StuCo Constitution," he added.
Jess Buicko -- reelected as vice president for the class of 2009 -- said it's "great" that so many members of her class council were also reelected to their positions.
"This year, the council has really started a strong foundation for our class, so I really think next year we have a solid base to improve upon," Buicko said. "It's great that the majority of next year's council from our [class] has been reelected, so it's sort of a continuation of what we've been working on."
At least two candidates are contesting the election results, and it's up to CSE -- under Batoff's leadership -- to decide whether anything comes of it.
"CSE has met with and discussed the person who turned in the spending report late," Batoff said. "We've already decided that that is going to be withdrawn."
"The second person who's contesting, we have to meet about. ... She does have a point -- that her friends might have voted in the beginning and they didn't know to vote again -- but then again there's that same scenario for everyone else who ran, so everyone's in the same boat."
Despite these initial problems, Atin Agarwal, current Student Council president, said things turned out "well."
"The election went really well overall," he said. "The fact that over 1,000 people voted is pretty amazing and I really have a lot of faith in all the candidates for next year. I think they're going to do a great job."
