The Daily Tar Heel
URL: http://www.dailytarheel.com/index.php/article/2012/02/leimenstoll_and_lewis_move_on_to_runoff_for_student_body_president
Current Date: Thu, 24 May 2012 11:47:04 -0400
Will Leimenstoll and Calvin Lewis move on to runoff for student body president
| 
Tools
Calvin Lewis Jr., left, and Will Leimenstoll react to Tuesday night’s election results. Lewis collected 23.1 percent of the vote, and Leimenstoll gathered 47 percent, according to unofficial results.
Possibly Related
- Pair of Church Street sexual battery cases being investigated by Chapel Hill police MAY 23
- UNC professor is named to the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of N.C. Board of Trustees MAY 23
- Kenan-Flagler study finds a perception gap in women’s leadership opportunities MAY 23
- WakeMed withdraws offer to purchase Rex Healthcare MAY 22
- Governor’s School pushes for restoration of funding MAY 22
In a shocking result Tuesday night, student body president candidates Will Leimenstoll and Calvin Lewis Jr. moved on to a runoff election.
Tim Longest, a frontrunner who received several campus endorsements, was eliminated, receiving just four votes fewer than Lewis, the second-place finisher.
Leimenstoll collected 47 percent of the vote and Lewis collected 23.1 percent. They will have another week to campaign before the Feb. 21 election.
The results are preliminary, and still must be certified by the Board of Elections.
Only 4,507 students voted in Tuesday’s general election, down from 7,105 last year.
The three candidates voiced concern earlier this week that new voting software, studentlife.unc.edu, would decrease voter turnout because it requires users to register.
Leimenstoll said he was satisfied with his campaign’s success.
“We’re going to give people a chance to recharge their batteries,” he said.
Lewis said he was relieved that his campaign survived another week.
“Now I can reach out to more people,” he said. “In a runoff there are fewer hands in the cookie jar, so there are more votes to be grabbed.”
Longest said he was shocked by the result, and believed that low turnout might have been to blame for his finish.
“I’m definitely surprised but I understand it’s a very low turnout election season,” he said after the results were announced.
Runoff elections have become a staple of student body president elections. Only twice in the past 16 years has one candidate managed to win outright in a field of three or more candidates.
Leimenstoll collected the most petition signatures of any of the candidates, while Lewis met the deadline only after a 24-hour extension.
Shruthi Sundaram, chairwoman of the Board of Elections, said each member of the board independently tallied the results, and came up with the same outcome.
“I’m 99.9 percent confident the numbers won’t change,” she said.
Online Poll:
Do you think fracking can be done safely?
45 comments
I call bullshit…the system used was tucked away and hard to find and graduate students were kept from voting in a lot of circumstances due to an error on the part of the BoE in classifying us all at district 7.
Longest should be shocked, and he should file a complaint as well. There are quite a few pissed off graduates out there.
This shows how deeply flawed the UNC election system truly is. For the past four years, “machine” candidates who operate on Morehead Cain Scholars and student government insiders, have gotten ahead to the detriment of this University.
Students here apparently can choose their smiley friends, not intelligent leaders.
If a 10% tuition hike is the floor, I can only imagine what the ceiling will be.
@Well Then: I’d love to agree with you about the Moreheads and insiders, but this year they were all on Longest’s campaign (who knows why though)
Four votes? The number of voting students was down almost 40%, and the Board of Elections is really going to make this call on four votes? Given that the fears about the online voting system were fully realized in terms of a lower turnout and an error in the delegation of graduate student votes, the Board needs to just make the runoff a full-on do-over.
Well then, you must have not worked on Will’s Campaign, because its all Moreheads, and nothing else. Hell, the only black guy in the picture is a Morehead!! Please get your facts straight and sit down.
First, Constance, you have no idea what you’re talking about. There were 2 Moreheads on Tim’s campaign to at least five on Will’s.
That being said, congratulations are in order for Mr. Liemenstoll—almost winning a majority straight in the initial voting is quite a feat.
However, if I were Mr. Longest, I’d be quite displeased. The voting failures are quite well known and to lose by 4 votes and have the BOE declare that as official is a travesty. While I doubt the runoff will change the end result, Mr. Longest was, simply put, robbed by the website.
Regardless of the election results, the fact that the comments on here attribute low voter turnout solely to the new voting system is disheartening. A lot of other factors contributed to the lower voter turnout- last year’s election season was a lot more contentious and exciting while this year was relatively tame. And in any case, it is the sbp candidate’s job to make sure people turn out to vote- a low amount of votes must be attributed primarily to a failure in campaigning. If a person with “a lot of support” failed to muster up 5 lousy votes then the blame lies solely on him and how his campaign chose to manage their time and resources.
Geez, good for Calvin. I don’t see any Jasmin coalition going on here though
Does it really matter how many Moreheads helped organize each campaign? What it really comes down to is a dedicated volunteer base and an active, intelligent and creative team. If some of those students are Moreheads, so be it — but I don’t think winning a scholarship suddenly imbues you with a magic election-winning power.
Best,
LD
Kudos are in order for the candidates who made it to the run-off election. The voting results show that despite the fact that endorsements take up the majority of the dth’s coverage, reaching out to individual students is much more important. Lewis did a good job of emailing nearly every student on campus, and Leimenstoll was a ubiquitous presence on campus, tirelessly conversing with different students day and night. Regardless, everyone who participated this year should be proud that they upheld the Carolina tradition by keeping the race free of the mud-slinging that dominated previous years.
GradStudent: Given a margin of error accounting for grad students being classified as district 7…. screw it, you’re not my TA. Tim still lost to Calvin. PEOPLE, NOT POLITICS!
1,042 votes isn’t survival, it’s domination. Nice try dth. #peoplenotpolitics
I am actually shocked. If it had not been that I am heavily involved in Student Government and already signed up for the website, I would not have voted. The BOE made it especially challenging for students to vote and there should be a complaint to it immediately. As well, Calvin Lewis should have been working on a real platform, instead of relying on the opinion of others and emailing students directly. I am truly disappointed with the results of this elections; however, I understand that students do not really care about SBP elections. It’s hard to ask students to vote based on anything but popularity when national politics are decided by the same factor. I hope that one day people will remove the rose colored glasses and realize that the SBP can create change if the right candidate is chosen. Calvin and Will, good luck and I hope one of you can engage the Board of Trustees with the same candor and strength as I expected of Tim.
It is ironic that you mention former SBP Jasmin Jones, considering that both of these runoff candidates will also require speech lessons before even being allowed in the same room as the Board of Trustees or Board of Governors.
It is comforting to know that we have two rock-solid choices to be the lone student voice on two of the more moneyed and powerful committees in the state. We can have Leimenstoll, who has already been described as “too deferential to be a credible student advocate”, or we can have Lewis, whose best metaphor for this election is that of a cookie jar.
Choose wisely, UNC.
The real winners in this election are the Board of Trustees and Board of Governors. They probably read this article and were thankful that the one candidate in this race who was most knowledgeable about the tuition crisis has been eliminated.
Now all they have to do is ignore one of the two uneducated, badly-spoken student advocates UNC could potentially throw at them and continue to pass legislation as if the student voice had never even uttered a word.
Then again, both these candidates promised to “befriend” the Board of Trustees during their year’s tenure as SBP, so I’m sure a roomful of old, affluent white men will really respect either Leimenstoll or Lewis after they try and “buddy up to them”.
Team Tim – I know you’re out there. Listen up.
If you want to get a re-vote – and you should – but don’t want your name on a complaint, you can still do it. Have one of the dozens of people who couldn’t vote file a complaint. So little as one such case will constitute a required re-vote.
This race does not call for a run-off, it calls for an entire do-over. After observing Mr. Longest, it seems he is too mature to call for a recount and drag the process out for the rest of the school, but this is typical yet again of UNC’s abhorrent technological failures.
Shruthi Sundaram and the Board of Trustees should be ashamed that their faulty voting system was the undoing of one of the most qualified candidates in this race. If they had done their due diligence and actually tested the voting system like the BOE did last year, maybe this problem would not have occurred.
Hand-counting ballots sent in to multiple email accounts after the BOE’s inbox is at capacity is not the way to run an election. Ms. Sundaram and the rest of the Board of Trustees should be ashamed of their laziness and lack of foresight.
The student body really picked two stand-up guys to represent our voices and opinions.
Leimenstoll, a walking, talking copy of the do-nothing, inefficient Mary Cooper, or Lewis, who is so uneducated about the issues that he seems to think ASG’s main purpose is for “networking”.
Leimenstoll, who will no doubt continue the trend of isolationist, insulated student government by appointing his underqualified friends to positions and decreasing the size of student government so it is even more elitist and one-sided than it is now.
Or Lewis, whose main qualifications for being SBP include participating in ROTC and holding a job as a bouncer at TopO.
Leimenstoll, yet another former Environmental Affairs co-chair running on a green (or is it greenwashed?) platform who promises the world but will deliver less than 2% of it – just like his predecessor who has been grooming him for this job all year.
Or Lewis, whose only vehicle of relating to the student body is to spam our inboxes with badly-written pleas to sign his petition or vote for him in the election. It’s good to know students at this University will do whatever an email tells them.
I don’t know anything about the candidates, but this new system seems like an utter sham.
I think someone said that people could email their votes to the BOE if they had a problem, but then the BOE email inbox became full requiring a hand note? What average voter is going to give that much effort?
Seems suspect.
Can someone please just give a formal complaint to the BOE and call a re-vote…this is ridiculous
I think the whole thing should be done again. People were confused by studentlife and I think it effected turnour. So many people couldn’t use studentlife that BOE“s inbox stopped receiving e-mails by noon (when I tried e-mailing them my vote) due to reaching message capacity (100). So, basically, 100 people weren’t able to use student life by noon. Then they weren’t able to e-mail their vote in either. How many people just gave up after that not knowing what to do? I’m afraid this election disenfranchised a lot of voters.
The election system was a joke. I tried to use studentlife (couldn’t), tried to email BOE (inbox full), and gave up.
Where are the District 11 results? Where?
I know many people submitted votes, but were they all counted for District 7 instead?
I think a re-vote may definitely be in the cards.
Honestly, none of them are going to be able to get anything done on the Board, so if its all the same, I’d prefer we skip the do-over so we can move on as quick as possible. Tim would cast a protest vote, Will would capitulate, and who knows what the heck Calvin would do. So lets just have the run-off already.
@Honestly One disenfranchised voter is one too many. This is Carolina, I would hope that we would hold up the ideals that everyone should be able to vote if they want to. The election should be redone on that ideal alone.
Join the discussion
You Should Know
The Daily Tar Heel reserves the right to remove any comment deemed racially derogatory, inflammatory, or spammatory. Repeat offenders may have their IP address banned from posting future comments. Please be nice.
If this is the first time you've commented, your comment won't appear until you've verified your email address.
Formatting Options:
- Links: "my link":http://my.url.com
- Bold: *something!*
- Italic: _OMG!_
Serving UNC students and the community since 1893
© 2012 DTH Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
Flag this comment