LSA juniors Noah Zimmerman and Jackie Hillman of the EnvisionBlue party will be the next CSG president and vice president, according to preliminary election results obtained by The Michigan Daily shortly after voting closed Thursday night. Zimmerman and Hillman ran against LSA junior Erica Nelson and LSA sophomore Ronald Burgaj of the Diverse&Dedicated party. On March 24, both CSG executive tickets participated in a debate hosted by CSG Election Team and The Daily to share their platform and policy ideas.
Following notification of the results, Zimmerman and Hillman expressed their gratitude and desire to get to work as soon as possible. In an interview with The Daily Friday morning, Zimmerman said he looks forward to representing the student body.
“We’re here to impact students’ everyday lives,” Zimmerman said. “We’re here to represent the broad range of students on campus and we’re hoping to be able to be successful in doing that.”
Hillman told The Daily she wanted to thank students who voted and said she is excited to create positive change.
“We’re incredibly grateful to everyone who showed up to vote,” Hillman said. “We’re excited to actually work on the projects that we’ve been talking about, starting right now.”
Nelson and Burgaj did not respond to The Daily for comment in time for publication.
The EnvisionBlue platform ran on 30 policy action items and 15 advocacy initiatives centered on themes including accessibility and affordability for all students, addressing the University’s history of sexual misconduct and increasing student engagement with CSG initiatives and elections. Zimmerman and Hillman are planning to reorganize the CSG executive branch before tackling their specific initiatives.
“We think that the best way for our executive branch to operate efficiently and get any of the projects, any of the advocacy that we want done is to make sure that we’re having the organization and structure within our team to be able to adequately do that,” Zimmerman said.
In addition to electing executives, students voted for representatives to CSG for their college — 15 for LSA, seven for Rackham Graduate School, six for the College of Engineering, three for the Ross School of Business, and one for each of the remaining undergraduate and graduate schools. Students also elected 19 LSA assembly members and the University of Michigan Police Department (UMPD) Oversight Committee student representative.
Below are the preliminary results for the top-voted representatives:
- LSA: Emma Sklar
- Law School: Ewurama Appiagyei-Dankah
- Rackham Graduate School: Hayden Jackson
- School of Dentistry: Palak Shah
- School of Public Health: Sarah Cieslak
- School of Public Policy: Divya Periakaruppan
- College of Architecture and Urban Planning: Tara Mehta
- College of Engineering: Maria Liberty Fields
- College of Pharmacy: Yuan Hang
- Medical School: Curtis Kuo
- Ross School of Business: Sophie Peretz
- School of Art and Design: Santana Malnaik
- School of Education: Stephanie Vuylsteke
- School of Information: Tobias Roth
- School of Kinesiology: Ember Larson
- School of Nursing: Estrella Escutia
- School of Social Work: Matt Dargay
- School of Music, Theatre & Dance: Emelia Piane
- UMPD Oversight Committee: Eli Merren
This year, 1,912 total ballots were submitted to the University-wide election, almost 100 more total votes from the Fall 2021 semester election. 1,057 voters supported the addition of a sustainability requirement into the academic curriculum, while 804 did not. Additionally, 1,611 students supported a non-voting student seat on the Board of Regents, while 240 did not.
Students also voted on a proposal that would ask the board to increase CSG’s tuition allocation by up to $4.75 per student, to which 942 voted yes and 903 voted no. If the results of this ballot question showed an “affirmative outcome,” CSG would request that the regents raise the student fee. Although the proposal received a majority vote, the implementation of the increase is still subject to a vote by the regents. Students currently pay $9.19 per year.
In the CSG presidential and vice presidential debates, Zimmerman and Hillman described a passion for improving campus and student life and noted their administration’s aspirations to do so.
“I understand that the only way we can be a more productive and inclusive community is by collaborating with student groups, collaborating with the administration and coming together as a community,” Hillman said in the debate.
In an interview with The Daily, Hillman added that she hopes to make CSG more accessible to students so that they can voice their concerns more easily and engage more closely with the governing body.
“The CSG structure is really convoluted for people that are kind of on the outside looking in,” Hillman said. “I think we want to just make that more accessible to students through revamping our entire website, revamping all the social media, just really creating channels that are going to be more conducive to students wanting to engage with them.”
Daily Staff Reporter Samantha Rich can be reached sammrich@umich.edu.