With the highest voter turnout in recent years, 948 students voted in last week’s Undergraduate Student Government elections.
Despite some technical difficulties with online balloting on the first day of voting, April 21, voting resumed the next day and yielded more votes in one day than the total of the last four elections combined.
Current USG President Kevin Hampton said he was pleased with the unprecedented level of student participation but would like to see even more in the future.
“I thought it was fantastic that we had so many campaigns that were actually contested between different groups,” Hampton said. “There’s still room for improvement. A thousand students out of 6,000 undergrads, that’s saying something. You need to have more involvement and more participation.”
The freshman class had the highest voter turnout with a total of 263 students participating. The next highest was the sophomore class with 242, followed by the senior (233) and junior classes (210).
Junior Dwight Anderson won a tight race for USG president, edging out fellow junior Liz Motz by just 1.3 percent. Anderson received 50.2 percent of all votes compared to Motz’s 48.9 percent.
Anderson said he’s grateful to have won such a tight race and is looking forward to his year as president.
“It feels really good,” Anderson said. “I was kind of nervous at first, but then I was like, ‘Whatever happens, happens.’ I’m excited for what we can do next year with the group of people that we have, and I can’t wait to get started.”
Anderson’s first presidential order was naming sophomore Greg Scharine as Vice President of Financial Affairs. Anderson’s decision was ratified by the USG’s general council at Sunday’s meeting.
The remaining executive board positions received more than 90 percent of the votes.
- Executive Vice President: Ann Ziegler (declined the position)
- Vice President of Academic Affairs: Abby Schutt
- Vice President of Public Relations: Corey Dahl
- Vice President of Administrative Affairs: Seth Williams
Some of the other general council positions were hotly contested, with three or more candidates in contention for the sophomore, junior and senior class senator positions.
- Senior Class President: Marcy Warren
- Senior Class Senators: Scott Hansen and Mohamed Hussein
- Junior Class President: Jazz Hampton
- Junior Class Senators: Adam Miller and Shakira Onwuachi
- Sophomore Class President: Mike Orth
- Sophomore Class Senators: Chad Miller and William Oppong-Bio
- Residential Senator: Jessica Root
- Neighborhood Senator (Merriam Park): Linnea Bicking
- Neighborhood Senator (WSNAC): Jared Scharpen
- Transfer Senator: Jessica Yang
- Legislative Affairs Senator: Quinn Abraham
- Commuter Senator: Dilbi Hussein
Brent Fischer can be reached at bafischer@stthomas.edu.