Issue date: 4/17/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Nicole Strittmater Meghan Charlier and Tim Lauer hold hands after hearing they were voted student senate vice president and president early Thursday morning in the Old Library. The ticket won by 24 votes in the largest election turnout in 15 years.

Editor's note: For a complete story about the election results, see Monday's issue.

By a narrow margin of 24 votes, students elected the ticket of Tim Lauer for student body president and Meghan Charlier for vice president.

With 2,378 votes cast, this is the largest turnout in 15 years; Lauer and Charlier received 1,201 votes and presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls Emily Mattheisen and Caroline Wee received 1,177.

But the final results didn't come so easily. On Wednesday, seven and a half hours after the expected time of results, current Student Senate President Ray French and Parliamentarian Christina Hansen tallied the votes in Old Library's 24-hour lab early Thursday morning, as some candidates on the ballot, including Charlier and Lauer, waited. Other candidates, including Mattheisen, waited in the library's lobby.

For the first time at the university, Senate held its general election electronically, ridding itself of the usual paper trails in Davies Center.

From Monday through Wednesday, voters could follow a link sent to them via e-mail to cast their vote, but several obstacles kept the procedure from running as smoothly as possible, French said.

Initially, voting was scheduled to end at 6 p.m. Wednesday. But for more than four hours the WebSurvey system had to be shut down Monday, so Senate decided at its meeting Monday night to extend voting to 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night.

"This has been really crazy," French said. "With any process there is always going to be trouble in the first round."

Within the first four hours Monday, 1,007 votes had already been cast, French said, but Senate found that faculty and staff could vote as well as students. After shutting down the system to remedy the problem, it found three illegitimate votes.

Continued...

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