After three weeks of campaigning for three different elections, engineering students can breathe a sigh of relief; election season is over! Engineering students on campus voted in the Engineering Society Election from February 5th to 7th, all engineering students voted in the Federation of Student (FedS) & Senate elections from February 8th to 10th and the on-stream 2012s voted for their Graduating Committee (GradComm) chairs for B-Soc from January 29th to February 3rd.
FEDS ELECTIONS & SENATE
In the FedS election, the remaining three Team REAL candidates easily swept the ballot with Matt Colphon as President, Prashant Patel as VP-Administration & Finance, and Natalie Cockburn as VP-Education. Following the resignation of Team REAL candidate Rob Fry, Unaffiliated candidate Luke Burke easily won the role of VP-Internal as the only remaining legitimate candidate. All the vice-presidential winners had between 44-50% of the vote, with Colphon receiving over 60% of all votes cast.
Trevor Jenkins, Juzer Sharali, and Syed Albiz (Team Rhino) will be half of the Engineering Councillors on the 2011-2012 FedS Students’ Council. The three remaining engineering seats will be filled in a spring by-election. In an unfortunate turn of events, the three engineering candidates who had received the most votes were Jenkins, Yousif Al-Khder and Erica Janitz (Team Rhino), however, both Al-Khder and Janitz failed to submit their budget forms by the end of polling period, thereby disqualifying them from the race.
Kevin Ling was initially in the Engineering Councillor race, but withdrew on January 24. Despite this, his name appeared on the ballot for a few hours during the beginning of the voting period before being removed, but still managed to receive three votes.
Ben Selby will replace Jay Shah as Engineering Senator, while Jeffrey Bunn will fill the Senator At-Large spot. In an outcome that is becoming more common, more individuals declined any three of the candidates in the Senator At-Large race than the total votes any candidate received. This result of apathy from students may show a lack of understanding of the role, or a want to remove the overtly general role that doesn’t fit into Waterloo’s faculty-centric social system.
Team Rhino, the satirical team consisting of math and engineering students, managed to make some ground in the race. Marc Burns, a VP-AF candidate from the Rhinos, managed to capture 29% of the vote against Patel, the best showing of any of the team’s executive candidates, while other executive candidates received between 12-25% of the vote. This is despite their performance in previous debates where the team promised nepotism in the selection of committee appointments and convention delegates, the abolishment of all student societies and their consolidation into a single society to be housed in The Used Bookstore, and a desire to use witchcraft to solve the problems the society is facing.
Some surprising successes did come to the Rhinos with two candidates successfully elected to council. Qifan Xi, a Math Councillor candidate for the Rhinos, managed to capture the third seat in that constituency. Erica Janitz would have been an Engineering Councillor had the aforementioned budget submission not occurred, which opened the door to Albiz to take the remaining seat. It is unclear whether these candidates will actually fill these positions or resign as their executive counterparts indicated they would do if they had won.
For a full break-down of votes and results from other faculties, check out vote.feds.ca. A big thanks to Chief-Returning-Officer Marco Yim and all members of the Election and Election Appeals committees for their hard work and for volunteering their time.
ENGINEERING SOCIETY & WEEF ELECTIONS
Following an intense four-day campaign period on the week of January 31st, the results of the toughly fought Engineering Society B elections were announced on February 8th at TalEng. Three positions saw more than one candidate submit nomination papers, requiring an election to occur.
Alessia Danelon will be the incoming President of B-Soc, while Yasser Al-Khder will be the new VP-External. Alexandra Collins will take over the financial reigns from Jon Warren and Mina Labib as VP-Finance.
As only one candidate submitted nomination papers for the VP-Education role and VP-Internal roles, Owen Coutts and Andrew Fisher have been tentatively acclaimed for their respective positions pending successful ratification by EngSoc Council on Wednesday February 16th. Both candidates will require 2/3 of vote by council before they can take officer, in accordance with the Engineering Society Constitution.
Laurin Benson is tentatively acclaimed WEEF Director, pending ratification by the WEEF Board of Directors.
Congratulations to all candidates and CRO Doug Fournier for an excellent election.
GRADCOMM
Congratulations to Cailin Hillier and Drew Lemcke who were elected as GradComm 2012 co-chairs for B-Soc. These two will join Michael Soares and Kristen Roberts, who were elected by A-Soc this past fall, to plan and oversee the fundraising, operations and planning of all the activities related to the Class of 2012’s graduation.
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