March 12, 2004 — “Grassroots” party presidential and vice presidential candidates Alex Lowe and Bobby Harrington are the winners of the Associated Students of the University of Utah (ASUU) final elections. Lowe and Harrington beat RE: Party candidates Chris Carlston and Ali Hasnain by 755 votes. (Lowe and Harrington received 2,936 votes. Carlston and Hasnain received 2,181votes.) The results were made public during an announcement party in the Olpin Union’s Crimson Underground last night.
According to Jackson Lever, ASUU elections registrar, 5,690 voters-or about 20 percent of the University student body-participated in the final election, held on Tuesday and Wednesday. All except 11 paper ballots, which were turned in at the ASUU offices, were cast online, where the two parties also campaigned at www.Votegrassroots.com and www.representeveryone.com. (About 2,000 more students voted in this year’s elections compared to the 2003 race.) Lever attributes the increase in voter turnout, the best in the last six years of online voting, to three factors: ASUU’s Get Out the Vote campaign; a greater number of parties-therefore more people-involved; and the new Dialogue Week, an additional pre-campaign week designated for candidates to discuss issues with students.
Looking toward the coming year, Lowe hopes his administration will help individual students find their niche at the University through a program called Registration for Involvement, which simplifies the process of registering student groups. “We would like to focus on creating more unity on campus through service, with it being the common ground, and continue the ASUU campus recycling initiative,” he says. “We would like to focus on promoting student advisory committees, help them get registered and help them understand the resources available to them.”
Harrington says the campaign experience has been “phenomenal, one of the best experiences I have had.” He notes that, throughout the campaign, he and Lowe tried to sit down with as many students as possible from many different areas of campus to see how they could better represent them next year.
The new senior class president is Sara (pronounced Zara) Hogan, who was elected on the RE: Party platform. She beat Grassroots senior class president candidate Jessica Rogers by 50 votes.
Sixteen senators and 48 assembly members were elected as well. For a listing of the winners, go to http://www.ustudents.com.