Nearly 3,500 students voted in this year’s Associated Student Government elections, setting a new record for voter turnout, ASG Judicial Board and election commission officials said.
“I was happy with the number of people who voted because we set a new general election record,” said Sean Melody, ASG’s technology director. “Everything went very smoothly.”
Melody also said he believes that the number of candidates running in the election increased student interest.
“We had a lot of qualified candidates running for a lot of different positions,” said Melody, a McCormick senior. “ASG publicized the election well through HereAndNow and The Daily. These all factored into the high student turnout.”
Three out of four races will be decided by runoffs Thursday after candidates failed to garner the required 50 percent majority vote. Weinberg sophomore Courtney Brunsfeld was the only candidate to win her race Tuesday, receiving 55 percent of the votes in the student services vice president contest.
The runoff for president will take place between Jordan Heinz, who received 1,528 votes, and Jay Goyal, who received 916. Srikanth Reddy and Art Janik will face off for executive vice president, and Ebo Dawson-Andoh and Debkumar Sarkar remain in the academic vice president race.
Current ASG President Adam Humann said the high turnout and number of competitive races proves that students having been paying attention to ASG’s accomplishments this year.
“ASG has been in the news a lot because we have dealt with a lot of issues that actually affect students this year,” said Humann, a Weinberg senior. “Our year probably did have some influence in student turnout and definitely had an influence on the amount of candidates who wanted to run.”
Weinberg freshman Meredith Nolan said she voted in the elections after she was reminded about them in a conversation at lunch.
“I voted because I was reminded by other students, but also because of the fact it does impact the future of Northwestern,” she said. “Based on the information I had, I feel I made the best choices I could.”
Nolan also said ASG’s online voting system made the elections “easy for students.”
“The ballot was right in front of me on the computer,” she said. “If the election occurred at a polling place, turnout would definitely be lower because everyone is so so busy and people would forget.”
But Weinberg freshman Dennis Flowers said he decided to vote because he supported certain candidates.
“I voted to support Jordan Heinz because he’s in my fraternity and I like his opinions,” he said. “Voting is something everyone should do because it gives you a way to exercise your opinion about things happening on campus.”
Flowers also said he thought the campaign was well publicized.
“The individual candidates did a great job getting their names out there,” he said.
But Jeff Newburg, a Weinberg sophomore, said he decided not to vote because he felt completely uninformed about the candidates’ ideas.
“I feel that if I had voted, I could have voted for the wrong guy just as easily as voting for the right guy,” he said. “It would have been easy to vote online, but it wouldn’t have done any good if I didn’t know who I was voting for.”
Newburg also said that although he didn’t vote, he feels the high voter turnout was “fantastic.”
“I know I’m a non-voter saying this, but it is encouraging that there is less disillusionment with the political process than I would expect,” he said.
