BRITTANY YEAROUT
News Assistant
The students have voted and the results are in, but questions linger regarding the guidelines for electronic campaigning and glitches with the link for voting.
Student Government Association elections began Wednesday, Sept. 14 and ended the next day at 8 a.m. Three senior senators, one junior senator, the sophomore and freshman class presidents, three sophomore senators and eight freshman senators were named.
On the day of elections, all the candidates received an e-mail from the SGA elections director, Kristen Compean, with an attachment accessing the link to vote. The e-mail was written as a form letter that candidates could send to friends.
The e-mail contained the disclaimer: “Do not mass e-mail it to your entire class though! That is the only regulation.”
The term “class” was interpreted differently by some of the candidates.
According to SGA President Leon Dixson, SGA clearly informed the candidates that there were to be no mass e-mails, meaning no random e-mails to individual courses, such as a religion class, and that all campaign materials must first be approved through them.
“The night of elections, there was more than one individual who sent out mass e-mails to people who were not even in their class, stating what position they were running for and their name,” Dixson said. “That was in clear violation of the campaign policy.”
Freshman presidential candidate Liz Abend violated the campaign policy and was disqualified.
“They said on the e-mail that the only thing you couldn’t do is send it to your class,” Abend said. “I inferred it to mean the entire freshman class. I was frustrated that it was so vague … I didn’t feel like I was being informed as to what the exact rules were.”
SGA found out after the election votes were tallied about the mass e-mails, and Abend’s disqualification did not change the results.
“We were going to pull her name out, but by the time we did, votes were already counted, so the students had already made their decision,” Dixson said.
Although voting online has increased the number of voters, problems with the link and the specific process of entering information to vote still kept some students from voting.
“A lot of people did experience problems with voting and being able to get onto the Web site and that was simply a problem because the type of Web address didn’t work on everybody’s computer,” Dixson said. “Eventually we were able to re-route the address that we gave everybody to the correct Web site.”
There was a total of 527 voters. 316 voted for the freshman president, and 96 of those went to the new freshman president, Stefan Holt.
Holt has been involved in student politics since sixth grade as a student representative. He was also the student body president his senior year in high school and went to Washington, D.C. for the United States Senate Youth Program.
“I like helping out, I like being an advocate, I like being that go-to-guy and if anybody has a problem, I will fix it. ‘Stefan will fix it for you,’” Holt said. “It sounds kind of cheesy, but that’s just something I have always like being.”
Holt said his goals are the same as his freshman class.
“I am hoping that I can be able to present the freshmen ideas,” Holt said. “At this point, I want to kind of get my feet wet and start going to meetings and figuring out what has already been done and what I can do to help improve the freshman class as well as Pepperdine.”
With 115 sophomore voters, 40 votes went to Courtney Cunningham, the newly elected sophomore president. Cunningham plans on unifying the class and encouraging them to get more involved.
“I decided to run because I felt that I didn’t really understand what SGA was about,” Cunningham said.
“So what I really wanted to do is change SGA a little bit, allow more of the students’ voices to be heard. I want my voice to be heard and I just want to produce more of a partnership,” she said.
09-22-2005