Twenty-two votes separated the two student government tri-executive tickets at the end of spring elections Thursday night.
Chris Schaefbauer, Ellie Roberts and Marco Dorado of the Unite ticket will take office in the fall, having beat out Inspire’s Alexis Scobie, Logan Schlutz and Colby Schwartz 3,354 to 3,332 votes, a 50-50 percent split.
“I don’t know that CUSG has ever seen an election that’s this close,” Representative-at-Large Scobie said. “The percentage was the exact same.”
Since tabling on campus is the primary source of vote-getting during student elections, Schaefbauer said, the Unite ticket can in part owe its success to longer hours spent behind the plastic partitions.
“At the end of the day we were out longer hours,” he said.
The election was conducted using approval voting, which allowed students to vote for as many or as few candidates as they desired, despite ticket affiliation.
In spite of their big win in the executive, the self-described “progressive ticket,” Unite, claimed just one of five representative-at-large positions with candidate Juedon Kebede. Inspire’s Ashley Prince, Brianna Majewski and David Bretl won three of the at-large seats. Each of the elected candidates won 12 percent of the vote.
The final at-large position was a tie between Inspire’s Joe Putnik and Rosana Rodriguez, each with 2,968 votes.
The tri-executive branch usually includes one designated president and two vice presidents of internal and external affairs. The Unite ticket will explore, for the first time in recent history, an executive of three presidents.
Schaefbauer said the three executive-elects seek equally divided power for the branch that represents campus as a whole.
“All three of those people do an equal amount of work,” Schaefbauer said.
Schaefbauer, Roberts and Dorado expect to work out how to specifically label and delegate their executive power as the election is finalized in coming weeks.
Contact CU Independent Copy Editor Alison Noon at Alison.noon@colorado.edu.
