by Timothy Baldi, Triangle staff writer
This week seven students were elected to be the freshman Student Government Association (SGA) members on campus. However, unlike previous elections on campus the outcome of the first voting resulted in four of the offices still being contested because of near ties.
Several factors played a role in making this class’s election unlike all others and set the stage for the unprecedented runoffs.
Strong participation by both voters and candidates was one such change. Out of an estimated 195 incoming freshmen on campus, approximately 180 of them voted in this election, according to the newly elected freshman Senator Peter Boyajian.
The large number of participants was also a significant difference, according to sophomore Senator and member of the Senate Election Committee Robert Franklin. Because 17 freshmen ran for the different SGA offices, chapel speeches were reduced to only two minutes.
However, the biggest change that Franklin said left him and the rest of SGA in “awe, shock, and surprise,”was the four ties. No other known election has resulted in ties between candidates according to him and Executive Vice President junior Tori Stewart.
Because of the unexpected voting results, the Election Committee held a runoff election for freshmen to revote on their choice in candidates after hearing instructions through two announcements and an e-mail. Freshmen,e-mailed Stewart saying who they wanted to elect to the four contested offices.
Emphasis was added that only freshmen had permission to vote in the runoff election because an estimated 40 upperclassmen, including new transfers, had voted in the first election.
When SGA attempted to remove the upperclassmen votes from the final numbers, the social class of some transfers was unknown. Because these questionable votes could not be counted or discarded without changing the results of the four offices in question, the Senate Election Committee broke new ground by creating the runoff election.
In the first election, the only three offices firmly decided upon were Kelly Findley for treasurer, T.K. King as minister to men and Amy Morris for vice president, who were all announced Thursday at the elections party.
The four positions in question were minister to women, contested by Angela Schimpf and Heather McIntyre, male representative between Peter Boyajian and Josiah Newport, female representative between Liz Vest and Christina Morgan and president between Caleb Blount and Josh Kirkland.
Around 5:45 p.m. in the cafeteria, Student Body President junior Evan Johnson announced that the victors in this year’s election were Heather McIntyre for minister to women, Peter Boyajian for male representative, Liz Vest for female representative and Josh Kirkland for president.