After a grueling campaign and a seemingly endless election night, at 3:30 a.m. Eric Greenberg was officially named Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate president, defeating Treasurer Michele Shelton by a sound margin.
"I think it's because we ran a really good campaign, we stuck to the issues," Greenberg said. "From the very beginning, right after the nominations meeting, we went dorm to dorm, we hit a lot of people. But next year, I'm going to try to go back to the people we talked to during the campaign and talk to them about their issues.
"We still have some work to do reconnecting with the people, and I'm looking forward to doing it," Greenberg said.
Shelton, for her part, said the campaign issues were not the deciding factor in the election.
"I think it was all about name recognition," she said. "I think it was who people knew more, and people knew Eric because of all the social stuff. It's like the Daily said; being treasurer is kind of a thankless, behind-the-scenes job."
Shelton said she plans to stay on the Senate and continue her work on several projects, particularly increasing student input on student-faculty committees, one of her campaign focuses.
The Greenberg victory is slightly clouded by senior Emily Stewart's allegations of election tampering at the polling station in Dewick/MacPhie. Once the polls closed at 11 p.m., ELBO members spent hours deliberating on how to deal with her complaint and eventually decided they would allow the election results to stand as long as the margin of victory was greater than eight percent.
A differential of more than eight percent, ELBO said, would theoretically be large enough to render irrelevant the limited tampering Stewart claims to have witnessed.
"The margin of victory was sufficiently large to quell any fears that the integrity of the election may have been comprised," ELBO Chair Shane Mason said.
Stewart will still receive a formal hearing, although the date has not yet been determined.
The votes cast on the other issues on the ballot - a revised Senate constitution and a pair of amendments that give culture group representatives full voting rights in the Senate and another that prohibits student groups from discriminating on the basis of self-acceptance of identity - are frozen until the TCU Judiciary can adjudicate the dispute over the campus-wide e-mail sent on Tuesday.
The presidential vote total of 1,616 - which does not include votes cast from abroad or ballots cast only for the constitutional amendments - was by far the highest in recent memory. The roughly 33 percent turnout eclipses those of the last two years, which were approximately 23 percent and 28 percent, respectively.
Now that the students have elected a president, the new Senate must elect its general board and Allocations Board - the body's last task for the academic year.
