Warden Elections 07

With the resignation of the Warden came one last chance for a Chair victory!

The October elections are seen by the Guild as a practice for the 'real' elections the following March. They're held to fill in any of the positions that weren't occupied during the last lot of elections. Obviously things like 'President' tend to have candidates in the main elections, and it's the lesser non-sabb things such as (in this case) the international students officer, the post-grad and matures students officer, and the Warden.

According to the Guild consitution, the Warden position cannot be held by a student. This made me wonder for a time if we could get away with nominating Nathan (aged 1), or even a chair. I decided not to try as I thought they'd probably have some kind of rule against this. Turns out, that they don't and I could have nominated an inanimate object.

Since the campaign time was barely present, this time we took the decision to buy a load of chocolate and hand it out. As expected, this went down very well indeed. The only problem was that voting was now online, and by the time people got to a computer the chocolate was long gone. It didn't help that logging on to vote took an absolute age ensuring only the most dedicated waited long enough to actually vote.

Glossing over the various mistakes and broken laws, and the length of time it took to get the results when all the voting was online and should have been instantly available at the click of a button the second the elections finished, I'll get straight to the result:

Total Number of votes cast: 211

First Count
Jonathan Bilmen: 83
Luciana Berger: 81
Damian Johnson: 35
R.O.N: 12

(Damian Johnson and R.O.N’s actual transferable votes were re-distributed)

Final Count
Jonathan Bilmen: 93 (elected)
Luciana Berger: 92

(these results, which were put on the guild website, are completely different to those that were read out on the night, which makes the winning single vote slightly suspicious in my opinion).

Ok, so 35 doesn't sound like a huge amount, but if we look at that as a percentage, things get far better. The previous best was 8% in 2006. This time, we came out with a huge 17%. Pretty darn amazing really.