Stephen Emery won the ASG presidential election held Tuesday and Wednesday.

The results are unofficial until the election committee meets Monday to review the election and verify the results. The new officers will be sworn in before the end of the spring term in May.

Emery said Wednesday, “I’m excited and I’m ready to go to work.” Emery and his running mate Branden Test received 121 votes out of 171, or 71 percent of the votes cast over two days. Less than 2 percent of the 9,337 full- and part-time students voted.
Joel Olney and Gibron Kraai received 26 votes and write-in candidate Nick Marshack received nine. There were 15 “other” votes.

Election coordinator Jeremy Bigelow said the total number of votes increased over last year’s election where 103 votes were cast. Two years ago when the college still used paper ballots for ASG elections, 900 votes were cast.

In a bizarre twist, Pedro Sanchez, a character from the movie “Napoleon Dynamite”, got about 80 votes, the result of a hoax by an unknown student who injected a virus into the election system, election officials said. ASG members were reluctant to discuss the incident, citing student privacy issues and not wanting to give credit to an unknown prankster.

ASG moved to electronic voting two years ago to make voting easier for students, to ease verifying results and to ensure students don’t vote twice.

Bigelow contends that both systems have flaws, and it was “way too late in the year to come up with the right system for voting.”

“I got into this position almost at the last minute, so we had to go with whatever system was in place. I really think we could get a higher turnout with the online voting. I just think it needs to be better organized. The online system works.”

Outgoing ASG President Bud Khuth said of the high voter turnout with the paper ballots, “It was two or three years ago. There was an incentive to vote because someone was giving out ice cream, and we can’t do that – coerce people to vote.” Asked about future elections, Khuth said. “We might try a mixed method in the future; we have the budget. It just depends on who is in charge of the election.”

Bigelow wants to assure students that identity theft was not an issue in the phony votes incident. “People shouldn’t be able to get to that information (i.d. numbers of students who voted). Student i.d. numbers weren’t used (to cast the invalid votes).”