The results are in. After a week of technical complications and lots of promotion, the executive board for WPI’s Student Government Association has been elected. The president is Emily Wilson, her vice president is Natalie Toomey, and the treasurer is Ryan Candy. There will also be general body senator elections happening now through the 19th. If anyone is interested, all they have to do is collect 60-90 undergraduate signatures and submit a statement to sgaelectionschair@wpi.edu.
If you were following the elections at all, you’d know that there were a lot of problems with the link required to vote. Christine Sharry, the advisor for SGA, told me that although the first few days were riddled with complications, the IT department on campus was instrumental and responded quickly to connect with members of SGA and work to resolve the issue. Changes that WPI had made to BannerWeb over the summer resulted in SGA losing access to their account. Once this was fixed, the site, unfortunately, crashed again. This was due to a campus-wide IT issue that affected many different systems and was able to be quickly resolved. “I think overall, everyone was very understanding and SGA worked to ensure the elections were not largely impacted by extending the days students could vote to let their voices be heard in voting for the candidates on the ballot,” Sharry said.
Regardless of these technical difficulties, the elections were a success. I saw a lot of buzz telling people to go online to vote. Distributed throughout the CC were business cards with various pictures of the candidates their bios. I was interested to know if the advertising made up for the lost time, or if the faulty link turned away a lot of voters. Edith Sawyer, the Chair of Internal Affairs of the SGA, informed me that this was luckily not the case. As far as voter turn out was concerned, they received an equivalent number of votes this year as averaged in years past.
“I hope we continue to see an increase in student turnout for campus-wide elections,” said Sawyer. The Student Government Association has a large impact on the student experience for the campus, not only through the financial support of clubs and organizations but also by serving as the student’s voice on campus committees, working on projects that improve the student experience, and voicing student concerns. As the next set of elections is occurring, a strong turnout is a goal for both Sharry and Sawyer. They believe that voting is “an important way to be engaged, an opportunity to be more informed, and a chance to have views represented”.
