On Monday, September 25, 2007 the Undergraduate Student Senate and the Graduate Student Assembly voted in a joint session to select the executive branch of the Student Body. Sean Weinstock, Senior Business Administration Major, was elected as the Student Body President. Adi Jain, a Senior Electrical and Computer Engineering Major, his running mate in the CMU5 campaign will serve as the Student Body Vice President. Joel Bergstein, Senior Engineering & Public Policy and Mechanical Engineering Major, was elected Vice President of Finance.  

This selection of the executive branch concluded a long and winding chapter for the undergraduate and graduate student government.  In the preceding 6 months, student government elections faced problems such as insufficient candidate interest, tampering with election results and, most recently, a lack of a unanimous decision between the Undergraduate Student Senate and the Graduate Student Assembly.

The first elections, scheduled for April 9, 2007 were postponed because the Elections Board did not receive petitions from students in MCS and CFA. Once these petitions were handed in, the elections were rescheduled for April 24, 2007. However, due technical glitches in the online voting process, the Elections Board thought it was fair to postpone the elections. The third round of elections before the end of the Spring 2007 semester saw a huge turnout of students from the campus community to vote for the student body elections. These election results were inaccessible due to tampering with the decryption key to decode the results from the ballots. 

As a result, then Senate Chair, Joel Bergstein, and GSA President, Elizabeth Ayers, used their constitutional powers to appoint Germaine Williams, a graduate history major, and GSA Vice President of Finance to serve as the interim President of the student body for the summer.

Finally, in September this year, the Elections Board organized a fourth round of elections for the executive branch of the student body. While it seemed like the elections may run smoothly at last, an unanticipated glitch prevented some of the graduate students from taking part in the online voting process. To combat with the problem, the Elections Board extended the deadline for those graduate students who could not vote, and even introduced paper ballots to make sure the elections were fair.  This was not enough compensation for the graduate student community. "Paper balloting worked, students just did not go to vote", said GSA President, Elizabeth Ayers. 

These elections would have declared Sean Weinstock and Adi Jain as the student body President and Vice President respectively, however, GSA failed to ratify the results of the election.

Regarding the lack of a unanimous decision, Ayers said, "It is not the results that are voted on, but the election process itself.  GSA not validating the results was a reflection on the election process and not on the candidates."  

On September 25, when the GSA and Senate finally reached a majority decision to reinstate the predicted winners Sean Weinstock and Adi Jain as SBP and SBVP.

In an interview preceding the elections in the joint session, Joel Bergstein, Student Body Vice President Finance, said, "If Sean and I are elected now, everyone will know that we went through with the whole process till the end and won fair[ly]."

Now that we finally have our executive branch in place it is time to look ahead.

To make sure that elections in the future run smoothly, President Weinstock said, "Adi and I are commissioning a committee to investigate the election rules in place and discuss possibilities for how to improve and/or overhaul those rules. The committee's proposal will be presented to both legislative bodies in Student Government for discussion and potential approval before the next elections cycle hits."

While the term of the candidates will be shorter than usual, the work has already begun. The administration is giving its full support to the student government, so they can see their plans materialize. The CMU5 campaign highlights some of the positive changes that President Weinstock and VP Jain plan to bring to campus. This includes, integrating Greek life into the campus community and carrying forward the work that former President Karl Sjogren and former VP Andrea Hamilton in building institutional memory by increasing the use of the Tartan Wiki, among other things. When asked about the time crunch that the current executive branch now faces, Weinstock said, "The real question at the end of everything should be something like 'Has the action that we've seen this year inspired us, as a student body, enough to believe that we can accomplish change if we really put our minds and hearts into it?'  I think that if the answer to this question is 'Yes', Adi and I have done our jobs."
We wish them a good luck and look forward to the positive changes that this campus is likely to see in the following academic year.

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