Andersen wins presidency

David Andersen captured the presidency of the undergraduate student body with 2,107 votes in the runoff election. His opponent, Andrew Howard, earned 944 votes, giving Andersen a margin of nearly two to one.

The runoff election was required because no candidate received a majority of student body support during the initial election last week.

Andersen said that he looked forward to performing his duties next year.

"I'm very happy with the outcome of the election, and I can't wait to get started. I want to commend my opponents for having run a good race, and they all deserve credit for bringing worthy student issues to the forefront," he said.

"I credit a large amount of my success in this election to the outpouring of support I received from campus leaders," Andersen said.

Charges pending from last week against one of the candidates (whose name was not released) will probably be dropped, according to Chris Rankine, chair of SGA's Elections Committee.

The accuser had not made contact with the committee as of Wednesday.

The committee also looked into campaign financing violations reported last week, and found no inaccuracies.

"We were not able to get financial reports from both candidates last Wednesday night, which is why we could not look into them," Rankine said.

"However," he added, "we reviewed them as soon as we got them, and found no problems."

Andersen said that he would pursue the objectives he laid out in his campaign upon entering office.

"As president, my first priority will be to appoint an executive branch that reflects the many different types of students on campus, since it's very important that all students are given fair representation in their student government."

"I will work towards finishing the initiatives that this year's exec began addressing. In addition, I will work to require professors to post all grades prior to finals week, and I will fight to ensure that students are given a strong voice in the planning of Tech's $1.2 billion capital campaign," Andersen said.

Howard said that although the campaigning period was difficult, he gained valuable experience from running.

"It was a rough three weeks," he said.

"If I had to run again, I would do some things differently," he added. "Still, it was a great experience, and I'm glad that I did run."

SGA officials also felt that the election was successful in terms of the overall process and student response.

"The election process went well," Rankine said.

"A few things will always come up in any election, but luckily, they were small this year. The election process was very clean."

Patrick Cook, SGA chair of Public Relations, said that the organization was pleased with voter turnout for the runoff election, 2,851, which was about 60 percent of the turnout in last week's election.

"We were very satisfied with the numbers-especially for the runoff elections," he said. "They were higher than they have been historically."

He added, "Both candidates received more votes in the runoff election than in the regular election, and this is a sign that people were attentive to the results in the previous election."