SCSU president Zuhair Syed has won this year’s executive elections to become the student union’s next president-elect.
After ballots were counted Friday night, Syed surpassed his opponent, Daniel Greanya, by more than 170 votes.
This year’s elections saw unusually high engagement at UTSC with student protests, a highly publicized radio show, and coverage in university and national news sources.
The result was more than 1,500 completed ballots and hours of counting for this year’s elections committee. “We started at 8 p.m. [on Friday] and finished right before 6 a.m.,” said chief returning officer Ryan Grosskopf.
But despite the large turnout, abstentions made up more than 10 per cent of total votes. Grosskopf said this may have been to due to students’ limited knowledge about other executive positions.
“People were just there to vote for one candidate and they didn’t know about the others,” he said.
Many of the candidates ran on platforms concerning accountability after news of the closure of campus restaurant Bluff’s and large executive pay raises made headlines in The Varsity, The Strand, and Maclean’s online. To Grosskopf, a lot of it seemed unfair.
“It’s no secret there was lots of hostility towards the current SCSU and that there’s lots of negative articles about the current SCSU, which some of them are re-running,” Grosskopf said.
Still, he admitted the media exposure did have advantages. “Whether [students] read the articles and agreed or they read the articles and felt they were unfair, I think either way it helped bring out a lot more people to vote.”
This year’s elections saw a number of noticeable changes, including three days of voting, five strikes needed for disqualification instead of the standard three, a strong Facebook presence, and campaigning during the voting days.
At press time, no student candidates had requested an appeal on their strikes or asked for a vote recount. The elections committee’s report is set to be ratified on Friday, February 27.
