By Cynthia Cho
Published April 11th 2005 in Stanford Daily Online
Within minutes, however, the victorious Melanie Kannokada and Aneto Okonkwo, both juniors, made their way from the back of the CoHo to the stage to greet friends and supporters.
Kannokada, who describes herself as a “normally calm person,” seemed to hold back tears as she received hugs and shook hands. “What did I tell you? What did I tell you?” shouted one eager supporter as he approached the ASSU president-elect.
But Kannokada would be the first to say that she was shocked by the results.
“Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong,” she said of her campaign in an interview with The Stanford Daily following the announcement. She listed the late delivery of fliers and the failure to receive endorsements from some student organizations — including the Students of Color Coalition and The Daily — as two things that did not work in her slate’s favor. Both Kannokada and Okonkwo admitted that before coming to the CoHo, they thought that their chances of a victory were slim.
However, no one seemed more shocked than Victoria Carr. Surrounded by a dozen supporters, the normally talkative junior remained silent and seated at a table while her running mate, junior Fernando Castillo, stood by. The silence, it seemed, was to maintain her composure. When she told The Daily that she would prefer not to be interviewed, her eyes brimmed with tears. Castillo also chose not to comment.
The Carr / Castillo slate had run a more visible campaign — in White Plaza, for example, the duo’s posters greatly outnumbered those of the Kannokada / Okonkwo slate — and while no slate had a clear edge going into the two days of voting, there had been some talk on campus that Carr and Castillo would come out on top. Among those who gathered to listen to Elections Commissioner Troy Steinmetz, a sophomore, announce the results of the election, there were more than a handful of students who seemed surprised by the outcome.
While Kannokada and Okonkwo were being interviewed by The Daily, for example, one student approached the pair and asked, “How did you do it? I mean, did you get the IFC [Interfraternity Council] vote?” The slate had received official endorsements from both the IFC and the Intersorority Council, as well as the Jewish Leadership Council and Club Sports.
Okonkwo said that while he and Kannokada had not received what some would say are key endorsements, they received support from smaller student groups whose leaders encouraged members to vote. He also explained that the pair ran a “grassroots” campaign that focused on door-to-door outreach in order to “meet as many people as possible.” And he said that they “focused on getting out the grad vote.”
Though there is no way to determine which get-out-the-vote strategies were successful and which ones were not, the last tactic seemed to have worked. A total of 1,021 graduate students voted in the executive race, whereas only 748 voted last year. Kannokada and Okonkwo captured more graduate-student votes than did Carr and Castillo; they also won more undergraduate-student votes.
ASSU Undergraduate Senate Chair Chris Lin, a senior, said that voter turnout was higher than that of last year. This year, a total of 5,096 people — 3,538 undergraduates and 1,558 graduate students — voted in the election overall, an increase from last year, when 4,896 people — 3,572 undergraduates and 1,324 graduate students — voted.
The ASSU executive election, however, was a different story. The total number of people who voted for one of the three major slates last year was 4,020. This year, that number was 3,995.
The executive election is conducted under an instant runoff voting system in which the winner must receive the majority rather than a simple plurality (in a plurality election, a candidate can win even if he or she receives less than 50 percent of the vote).
All voters are asked to rank candidates in order of preference. If one candidate receives the majority of the votes in the first round, then he or she is declared the winner. If not, the last-place candidate is eliminated and all of the ballots are counted again in a new round. For a voter who ranked the defeated candidate as his or her first choice, the voter’s second-choice candidate is then counted instead. This process — of eliminating last-place candidates and recounting the ballots — continues until one candidate receives the majority of the votes.
In round one of the executive race, Kannokada / Okonkwo received 1,757 votes, Carr / Castillo received 1,501 and Avalanche of Diversity received 737. In the second round, with Avalanche of Diversity out of the running, Kannokada / Okonkwo received 2,008 votes and Carr / Castillo received 1,724. Kannokada / Okonkwo received the majority of the votes (50.03 percent of all votes cast in the executive election) in this round.
While there was no need to advance to another round, the Elections Commission advanced to a third round to get an indication of how many people had ranked Kannokada / Okonkwo as any of their three choices, according to Lin and Steinmetz. In the third round, Kannokada / Okonkwo received 3,019 votes.
Kannokada and Okonkwo will take office on April 20, as long as the Senate or the Graduate Student Council do not invalidate the results. But they have no plans to sit around and relax for the next two weeks. Okonkwo, when asked when he would start working, said, “We’ve already been working.” And when outgoing Vice President Kory Vargas Caro, a junior, approached Kannokada and Okonkwo to offer his congratulations, Okonkwo said, with a smile, “I’ll be calling you a lot.”
But the two did make some time to celebrate on Friday night.
“Can we have the party in the office?” Kannokada said as she left the CoHo.
Which office? The ASSU office, of course.
