Students turned out in extraordinary numbers Thursday for student government elections, with over 33 percent of eligible students casting ballots. The turnout caught the Rules and Elections Committee, which organizes and oversees elections, by surprise, and they ran out of the mugs that are traditionally given out to students by mid-afternoon. In all, 2,265 students went to the poll sites—with nine submitting absentee ballots—to vote for the over 60 registered candidates.
“I thought it went really well,” said RNE Chair Matt Ezovski. “I think we had a lot of student interest this year, and that the candidates campaigned hard … There was a lot to discuss.”
Coming alongside the largest turnout in recent memory was the first time RNE was forced to hand count an entire election. The software the Committee uses experienced a massive failure, and the scanner was only able to validate Rensselaer Identification Numbers and not record votes. Usually, RNE only hand counts write-in and absentee votes, which only account for a small percentage.
“Instead of taking 10-15 hours to count the final election, it took us more like 50,” Ezovski said.
The problems led to the Committee only announcing certain results at the Grand Marshal Week Finale on Friday. Results were reported for Grand Marshal, President of the Union, Student Senate, and class presidents. RNE has since tallied the votes for the remainder of the positions, and these results are now available on the RNE website. The address for the site is http://elections.union.rpi.edu.
The Committee ordered 2000 mugs this year, ran out of them by 2 pm, and began to distribute the mugs left over from previous years to satisfy voting students. However, these went quickly, and many students were left without a mug after voting. One of the consequences of this lack of mugs is the freshmen who vote next fall for their senators and representatives will not be rewarded with a mug.
“It would be irresponsible of us to order substantially more mugs than we expected to give out,” Ezovski explained. “We’re trying to spend activity fee money responsibly. Most freshmen don’t know that they get a mug when they vote, it just kinda happens.”
The freshman class had by far the largest turnout on Thursday, with more than 57 percent of the class voting, as opposed to 33, 29, and 19 percent for the Classes of 2006, 2005, and 2004, respectively. However, the disparity between the Class of 2007 and the other classes is not remarkable.
“The freshmen always come out in droves compared to the other classes,” said Ezovski.
