Results of the Central Student Government’s fall 2015 elections are in, with voters selecting representatives from the Ford School of Public Policy, Medical School and School of Education — in addition to the student who will head the Department of Public Safety and Security Oversight Committee. Due to a tie of one vote each, no candidate from the School of Natural Resources and Environment was deemed eligible to serve on the CSG Assembly.
While those elections have concluded, voting is now underway for representative positions from LSA and Rackham Graduate School due to an error in the online voting system.
According to CSG elections director Benjamin Reese, a third-year law student, voting for each of these two schools will run through Tuesday. All votes cast during last week’s originally scheduled election must be recast.
The error stemmed from the voting system’s ranking mechanism, a setting that Reese said wasn’t enabled when elections went live online. Subsequently, he said, it was not clear which candidate was being voted for in the cases of LSA and Rackham. Elections for DPS Oversight, as well as those for all schools besides LSA and Rackham, were not affected.
LSA sophomore Lisa Pomeranz won the DPSS Oversight elections with 568 votes over Engineering sophomore John Houghton who had 318. Public Policy senior Sloane Forbush won the representative seat with 37 votes over Public Policy junior Sara Dagher, who had 27.
With 51 votes, second-year Medical student Alia Ahmed won the Medical School representative position by a margin of 11 votes over a write-in candidate, second-year Medical student Benjamin D. Long. Education graduate student Michael Chrzan, a write-in candidate, won with a total of five votes to be a School of Education representative.
All of the eligible voters from each school are compiled in a list, though votes can come from anyone who visits the voting website. Reese said the administration checks through the voters and compares them to the master list to make sure those capable of voting are validated.
“Everyone’s allowed to vote, if they’re not on that list we have to see whether they’re enrolled or not,” Reese said.
Reese said a member of the University administration supervises the elections. The elections director is not privy to the actual lists, because of laws under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act that protect students’ information from being released to other students.
Write-ins to fill the vacancies for all available schools included a write-in nomination for Michigan Football coach Jim Harbaugh, and voters for the School of Education provided a double ticket of Bernie Sanders and Ben Carson for the representative position.
“It happens every year,” Reese said of the joke write-ins.