Katie Markey and Selina Poulsen were announced yesterday as the 2010–11 ASPSU president and vice president, respectively, winning a total of 432 votes out of 701 valid votes collected during the election. Krystine A. McCants, who ran against Syed Qasimuddin and current Student Fee Committee Vice-Chair James M. Gent, was elected as the 2010–11 SFC Chair with 367 votes.
The total number of votes received this year is 99 less than the number received in last year’s election, which is considered to have had a low turnout.
Markey, Poulsen and McCants were all part of the Students First slate of candidates.
“My heart literally stopped,” Markey said after her name was called. “It’s a big task ahead of me and I’m looking forward to it.”
According to Markey, the first task she would like to accomplish in office is to hire staff members and to fill All-University Committees. This process includes setting time limits for posting jobs in order to “keep [the hiring process] as professional as possible,” she said.
“[If we] start hiring sooner, we can get a coherent group together,” Markey said.
As the new ASPSU vice president, Poulsen hopes to start with a “backwards plan.”
“[Backwards planning is] establishing an end goal and then doing whatever is needed to get there,” she said.
Poulsen said she also wants to ensure that all 25 Student Senate seats are filled by next September.
McCants’ first plan in office is to meet with the new SFC in order to discuss how to communicate with SFC-funded groups. In addition, she will check in with those student groups to establish communication, McCants said.
“I want everybody to be on the same page about the [SFC].” she said. “I’m really excited to take this on.”
During the election, presidential candidate Jil Heimensen and others accused Markey of misconduct after several students claimed they saw her making copies of voter registration cards collected during the Get Out the Vote campaign with the intention of using the information in her campaign.
In an open letter to Markey, Heimensen wrote, “After speaking with numerous opinion leaders and staff on campus, I discovered that copying voter registrations is a standard practice…I truly believe that you were not doing anything other than working very hard for students during the voter registration process.”
Commenting on the elections results, Heimensen said she was not surprised by the outcome. As write-in candidates, Heimensen and her running mate, Johnnie Ozimkowski, were not allowed to campaign on campus. However, she said she was excited that she and Ozimkowski received 269 votes.
Heimensen said that she believes the guidelines for elections processes need to be changed in the future to allow campaigning of write-in candidates. In addition, she spoke with a lawyer about the constitutionality of barring write-in candidates from campaigning and was told that the rule was certainly questionable.
Although Heimensen will not be involved with ASPSU next year, she hopes to get involved with politics on a state level.
2010-11 Student Senate
Adam Rahmlow (199 votes)
Cathy Symes (274 votes)
Matthew Fleskes (279 votes)
Lucius Shields (282 votes)
Karen Ulbright (240 votes)
James Au (270 votes)
Armenia Sarabia (211 votes)
Alejandro Hoyer (181 votes)
Patricia Binder (222 votes)
Jared Stromer (142 votes)
Makoto Matt Blasa (222 votes)
Sephinish Guild (205 votes)
Aniq Tanwir (270 votes)
Pearce Whitehead (205 votes)
2010-11 SFC members
Xiaxi Mei (258 votes)
Yusug Godil (303 votes)
Aaron Aikin (218 votes)
Aaron Baker (321 votes)
Sid Gandhinathan (212 votes)
Marcus Mantik (223 votes)
Molly Shove (243 votes)