After nearly 6 months of turmoil and technical glitches, a new Student Body President, Vice President, and Vice President of Finance have finally been selected and approved.  On September 24th, during a joint meeting of the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) and Student Senate, undergraduate student senators and department representatives from GSA elected Sean Weinstock, Senior Business Administration Major, as Student Body President.  Weinstock has chosen Adi Jain, Senior Electrical & Computer Engineering Major, to serve as his Vice President.  Additionally, Joel Bergstein, Senior Engineering And Public Policy and Mechanical Engineering Major, was confirmed as Vice President of Finance. 

Though elections were held for the third time in early September, the GSA failed to ratify the results due to a problem that prevented some graduate students from voting online for a period of a few hours that was quickly corrected once the glitch was identified. All students could vote either online or at the written ballot boxes in front of Wean and Doherty Hall.  If the original results had been ratified, Sean Weinstock and Joel Bergstein would have been elected to Student Body President and VP of Finance respectively. Because the results were not ratified, interested candidates were required to submit petitions of 100 signatures to the Student Senate and GSA to be considered again. Only three petitions were submitted, and one of the three petitions was invalidated due to a lack of required signatures.  This left Weinstock and Bergstein as the only candidates running for the open positions.

When questions were raised about the possibility of not confirming the two candidates tonight, GSA President Beth Ayers, a graduate student in the Statistics department, reminded the senators and representatives that "it's really something that we need to think about hard – what's in the best interest of the student body." A member of the GSA asked whether the petition period could be extended for another 10 days, but former presidential candidate Alan Eaton, Senior Philosophy major, responded that he couldn't "imagine [another] person at this point wanting to come forward after 6 months of elections ... We've gone through this process twice before."

In the end, the majority of senators and representatives confirmed and elected the two candidates. For Weinstock, GSA voted 30-6-2 (For, No Confidence, Abstain) and the Student Senate voted 20-0-1.  For Bergstein, GSA voted 34-2-1 and the Student Senate voted 20-0-1. So now, for the first time in months, Carnegie Mellon University's student government finally has an official, elected executive branch.

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