With 51.8 per cent of the vote, Sam Lambert was elected the Students’ Union president for the 2014-15 year.
“I want to thank everyone who supported me throughout the process,” he said, following the news. “It’s an unbelievable feeling and I can’t explain it.”
Lambert explained that his first step as president elect will be to go to the Students’ Union office tomorrow to pick up the proposals for the VP positions he will be hiring for.
“I’m looking forward to everything the VP’s have to propose,” he continued. “I’m looking forward to hiring and then budgeting.”
Lambert spent the last two weeks campaigning, along with his fellow candidates Chandler Jolliffe and Justin Tabakian. He said he appreciated the “friendliness” of the campaign period.
“I think we all appreciated the fact that we were doing our best,” Lambert said. “…It was very friendly and I appreciate everything the other candidates did.”
Lambert won the election by 148 votes. Chandler Jolliffe was a close second and Tabakian came in third.
“I couldn’t be more proud of our team or our campaign,” commented Jolliffe. “We set out with a goal to run a campaign that was based around ideas and platform issues, not around marketing gimmicks, and that’s what we did.”
He wished Lambert best of luck with his presidency next year.
Tabakian said he doesn’t have any regrets in regard to his campaign
“Everything I have done is hands down a reflection of my campaign team,” he said. “…For the people who put their faith in me, I’m sorry that I disappointed them. I appreciate them having their support in me.”
Moving forward, Tabakian said he doesn’t have any plans solidified. But he’s aiming to take some time to re-evaluate the next 12 months and wants to “make the best of it.”
“I honestly couldn’t have enough respect for Chandler and Sam,” he concluded. “They put an incredible campaign forward- they made it such a good race.”
Polls officially closed at 8:00p.m. on Thursday. However, the results were delayed until nearly 12:30 a.m. due to technical difficulties with the new voting software. This was the first election that a ranked voting system was used.
Jordan Epstein, chair of the board and chief governance officer, explained that there were “absolutely no kinks” for the president and board of governors portion of the tallying. When it came to the board of directors, however, there was a problem with looping the votes which caused the delay.
In terms of voter turnout, over 5,000 students logged onto the system. However, many students did not vote. Epstein speculated that they may have logged on, been confused with the new system and did not cast any votes.
As well, Brantford turnout was less than half of what it was last year.
Overall, however, Epstein said he was happy with the way elections ran.
“I did feel this was a very clean campaign. Last year was the hacking incident, this year there was nothing approaching that level. Candidates had really amicable relations between them.”