Written by Jeremy Watson
The elections for the Student Association officers of the 2009-2010 school year ended with no victor for both the president and vice president offices Wednesday, April 1.
Though more students voted in the recent election than in any previous SA contest, none of the three candidates for each office received a majority of the votes, and as such, a run-off will be held next Wednesday, April 8, between the two candidates who received the most votes for each office. Jordan Stanley and Alex Ritchie will compete for the vice president office, while Sky Vanderburg and Bryan Clifton will vie for the office of president. Current SA President Michael Crouch said Vanderburg and Clifton will speak in chapel on Tuesday, April 7.
“Tuesday, the two presidential candidates remaining will be discussing some subjects in chapel, which will be moderated by Megan [Reese, the SA vice president and election chairwoman] and myself,” Crouch said. “We hope that that gets even more exposure for the students.”
Voting in this election was done through e-mailing an individual link to the ballot to each Harding student after the success of the same method in last year’s election, the first to utilize online voting. However, there were a few flaws this year as some e-mails were sent back to the SA as spam e-mail.
“Basically, the university policy is to send e-mails with the ballot connected to them to the preferred e-mail account that the student signed off on that they wanted their e-mail to be sent to,” Crouch said. “For some students who had a lot of problems, their e-mail is not their Harding e-mail. We strongly encourage that it be their Harding e-mail because it is the easiest for us to send it to them. A lot of e-mail services don’t accept mail for certain reasons, and it was blocked.”
Crouch said that even though some students did not receive a ballot link, enough students voted to provide a representative sample of the Harding student body, which means the results of this election were valid.
“1,688 students voted, the most we’ve ever had,” Crouch said. “Of course, not every student votes, and a lot of them abstained, so there are a lot of factors that go into this race.”
Another factor in this race was a change in the policy regarding who is allowed to know the election results. According to Crouch, in previous elections, candidates did not know where they stood throughout the election. Due to electronic voting, however, running totals could be kept and candidates were allowed to see the results in real time.
“This year, … everyone knew, had the opportunity to know all day how it was going, whether it was them or … a person they were sending in their place,” Crouch said. “The [SA] constitution stipulates that either the candidates themselves or an official for them can see the results.
“So that was going on throughout the day, which makes for an interesting scenario, because up to the last minute they know exactly where they are and they know how many votes they need to get. In the end, it seemed to be all right.”
Crouch and Reese said they felt the election, while it had its snags, went fairly well, especially the number of students participating in the election. Crouch, however, said he did know of one improvement that could be made next year.
“I hope that those who were involved will clean up their trash, better known as campaign posters, because that is a waste of paper,” Crouch said. “I’m hoping that whoever wins this SA election, the president and vice president will team up so next year will be a paperless election and not so many trees will be killed as there were this year.”
