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St. Cloud State University
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Voter turnout disappoints
Elections for student government candidates attract 664 voters
By Geoff Higgins
Published:
Thursday, April 24, 2003
Election Judge, SCSU student Luke Evens goes over the do�s and don�ts of using the ballot to student voter Beau Hughes.
There was not a great turnout of voters for the student government elections on Monday and Tuesday, but there was still a great deal of excitement regarding the results.
Students were given the opportunity to vote at various locations around campus as long as they were able to present their student identification card. Out of about 16,000 students on the SCSU campus, a relatively small number of votes were cast to determine the next president and vice president of student government.
Cory Lawrence and Rachel Hughes needed a mere 479 votes to secure their victory over Chris Lindahl and Taylor Olson, who only tallied 185 votes total.
Lawrence said that he felt confident in the campaign efforts that Hughes and himself put forth.
"I thought we ran a very good campaign," Lawrence said. "We tried to talk to as many students as we could."
Like Lawrence, Hughes said that she felt their victory was due to a solid campaign effort. When it came down to the time of the two election days, Hughes said that it made no sense for her and Lawrence to lose sleep over the results.
"The results were not worth worrying over because we knew that we tried our hardest and did all we could," Hughes said.
Now looking ahead, both Lawrence and Hughes are aware that their new positions on student government will be mostly about business. Both the new president and vice president are very confident in each other and their newfound roles that will begin midway through this May after the end of this spring semester. Each feels that this is indeed a great opportunity to make a difference around campus.
"I'm excited for the opportunity to be a student advocate," Hughes said. "I can't wait to start making a difference. Cory and I are to be working as a team."
Lawrence said that his time to start working for the students of SCSU as president will begin as soon as possible. Lawrence said that he thinks the first accomplishment he would like to achieve is empowering the students of SCSU and help ease the burden of state budget cuts. Lawrence will attend conferences during the summer that he believes will be instrumental in achieving these goals.
Other recent campaigning around campus was by students running for positions on the student government senate. There were 16 senator at-large seats available. Senators at-large are designated to represent the entire student body of SCSU.
With there being 16,000 students attending SCSU, one senator at-large represents about 1,000 students.
This election only had 15 students on the ballot running for senator at-large. Those 15 candidates each received plenty of votes and were all elected into senator at-large positions. This left one seat available to any SCSU student that wanted to run as a write-in candidate.
The official winner of the 16th seat became Alberto Serrano-Rivera with 31 votes.
The write-in voting election decision was challenged by a student who believed he had actually received the most write-in votes. According to current Student Government Vice- President and Election Committee Chair Desiree Westby, the problem is that student government received votes for many different versions of this candidate's name. The judicial council of student government decided during an emergency meeting Tuesday night that the candidate had to use his full name for his votes to qualify.
Westby said that there are other people with the same middle name as this candidate, which is what a lot of his voters wrote him in on the ballot as.
Amendments to the student constitution were another topic that students were given the opportunity to vote on during these elections. Although 410 votes were cast to change the student constitution and 106 voted against the amendments, there were not enough votes made to qualify to make the changes. In order for the amendments to pass, eight percent of the student body had to vote on the issue. Westby said that the student body voter turnout for this issue was well below eight percent.
"We were essentially about 400 votes short," Westby said.
Student government has an election committee that handles all of the presidential and senatorial race affairs including the counting of votes. Most of the voting is done on bubble sheets and tallied by a computer. The write-in votes are hand counted by the election committee.
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