Journalism freshmen Tania Mendes and Beth Wischnia were named president and vice president of the Downtown campus student government on Monday.
Mendes earned the most votes of the four presidential candidates and won the election with nearly 29 percent of the votes. She will become the Downtown campus’s first elected president after the student government ratified a constitution earlier this semester.
Mendes said she was excited about being elected.
“I’m just looking forward to basically what we need to work on, just building the student body,” she said.
Mendes said her first order of business is to attend various meetings concerning the rise of tuition, choosing the executive board and promoting student government.
“All together, I just want to get our board all in the same picture for next year … so that we’re all on the same page, all having the same concerns and just making sure that our executive board is really strong,” she said.
Nonprofit leadership and management junior Olga Lykhvar came in second with more than 27 percent of the votes cast, only four votes less than Mendes. Journalism freshman Duyen Tran gained nearly 25 percent of the ballots and junior Rabia Abdulmajeed, the incumbent president, gained about 19 percent of the votes.
Abdulmajeed said Mendes was the right person for the position.
“If I wasn’t going to be re-elected, I wasn’t comfortable in letting someone else step in, but knowing that she won, I’m actually peacefully quite happy with that,” she said.
Abdulmajeed, who was chosen by a board as president last May, helped put together the student government’s constitution and said the campus’s first election is a step moving forward.
“The first election is always a big deal — the first anything is always a big deal,” Abdulmajeed said. “The next year’s [election] will be much easier dealing with campaigns and whatnot.”
Abdulmajeed said she plans to remain involved with student government.
“I’m actually excited to work with [Mendes],” Abdulmajeed said. “She’s very strong, and she has the right intentions.”
While the student government’s constitution states that a candidate needs more than 51 percent of the votes in order to win, this year’s election was run by rules based off of an election code that all candidates had knowledge of. Elections committee member senior Ashley Payne said that policy was only for this election.
“This year is just different,” Payne said. “We don’t have policies in place. We don’t have previous knowledge, so we thought the best way to come up with a winner would be to do by majority, which would be the person with the most votes.”
Five students were elected to senator positions: junior Charlie Jannetto and freshman Josh Frigerio from the journalism school, freshmen Amanda Cram and Ariana Heet from the nursing school, and freshman Abby Wischnia from the school of public programs.
A total of 294 ballots were cast in the election. Elected students will begin their one-year terms on May 18.
Payne said she was surprised by how many students voted in general.
“I think it turned out really well,” Payne said. “Next year, as an election committee, we should do more marketing for the election itself … to notify students that there’s an election going on.”
Reach the reporter at snrodri2@asu.edu.
