The Michigan Action Party dominated the Michigan Student Assembly and LSA Student Government elections held last week, according to results released Friday. Zack Yost and Mohammad Dar, the MAP presidential and vice presidential candidates, won their posts with over 75 percent of the vote.

Voter turnout was down from last year. More than 3,700 people voted in the MSA presidential election -3,000 fewer than in last year's highly contested election.

MAP's LSA-SG presidential candidate, Keith Reisinger, and vice presidential candidate, Hannah Madoff, ran unopposed in their election.

MAP clinched nearly every seat it had a candidate for in both MSA and LSA-SG, losing only one seat to independent candidates in each of the student governments.

DAAP, the other major party involved in the election, won five seats on the assembly but was unable to defeat MAP in any of the races in which the two parties went head-to-head.

"I guess Zack Yost just knew a couple more people than I did," DAAP presidential candidate Maricruz Lopez said.

DAAP's presidential ticket of Lopez and Sarah Barnard garnered 500 more votes than DAAP's ticket last year. Lopez and Barnard won 25 percent of the vote - compared with about 5 percent last year.

Although that increase may be the result of DAAP's status as the only opposition party in the election, Lopez said she was optimistic about her party's future in the aftermath of the passage of November's affirmative action ban.

"I just think that this campus is a lot more politicized because of the events of the last year," Lopez said.

One of the independent candidates who won, LSA junior Tim Hull, took the fourth highest weighted vote total for an LSA seat in MSA - despite receiving only the 12th highest raw vote count. This means that while Hull may have received less votes than the other winning candidates, those that did vote for him rated him very highly on the 1 through 10 voting scale.

Hull attributed his victory to a desire for a different voice in a candidate field that featured only two parties: the powerful MAP and the radical Defend Affirmative Action Party.

"I'm a distinct, unique voice on the Assembly," Hull said. "The one concern I've had is that MSA is kind of homogeneous. There's one type of person on MSA."

Yost said he was prepared to tackle the perceptions of sameness and slow-moving bureaucracy that have characterized MSA.

The first part of his - and MAP's - new plan is the creation of an MSA internship program. This would bring young students and incoming freshmen into a development program familiarizing students with the way that student government works at the University.

The plan is the brainchild of a reorganization committee established in January to battle the web of bureaucracy that can slow the assembly to a halt. The idea is to scale back the number of committees and create a more vertical chain of command that leads to the executive members.

"There's too much information to communicate back and forth," Yost said.