The Martlet

Voter turnout rose slightly in this year’s UVic Students’ Society election, according to Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Conrad Vanderkamp.

Though Team FAST took the four executive seats again, their slate lost seats overall.

The numbers showed that 2,968 students voted, representing 18.8 per cent of UVic’s undergraduate population.

That’s up from a 15.6 per cent voter turnout last year. Vanderkamp said the election went well overall.

“People were civil and considerate [this election] and nobody played any dirty tricks,” said Vanderkamp.

Veronica Harrison, Edward Pullman, Heather Mckenzie and Meaghan Kerr will sit respectively as the next UVSS chair, director of finance, director of services and director of academics.

Team BANG came in at a close second for executive positions, with candidates each sitting around 200 votes behind the Team FAST candidates.

While Team FAST scooped all executive positions, the 11 director-at-large seats will be occupied by a majority of non-FAST members.

Both members of the two-person BOLD slate — Kelsey Hannan and Nathan Warner — were elected, as well as five members of BANG — Nadim Adatia, James Coccola, Rajpreet Sall, Remy Hall and Meghan Shannon.

Dylan Hardie, one of two independent candidates, was also elected.

FAST gained director-at-large seats for Brodie Metcalfe, Christine Comrie and Leah Staples.

The UVSS board is made up of 15 elected students and five advocacy group members, for a total of 19 voting members at each board meeting.

The UVSS board chair only votes in the event of a tie.

The current board is made up of an 11-member Team FAST majority. However, the next board will have a seven-member FAST minority.

As the Martlet reported last week, election shenanigans were minimal.

However, Vanderkamp said the last day of voting did see one strange occurrence.

“Sometime in the afternoon a poll-sitter noticed that a stack of [executive] ballots had vanished from right under her nose,” he said.

Polls were shut down within six or seven minutes of the ballots vanishing, said Vanderkamp.

Election officers took steps to foil any possible ballot-box stuffers by getting poll-sitters to have voters put only one ballot at a time into the box.

Mysteriously, the missing ballots were never discovered, Vanderkamp said.

Final count was only off by four ballots, so it seems the stack was never used.

Results won’t be finalized until ballots from co-op students are received and counted.

Co-op students have three weeks after the close of on-campus polls to cast their ballots from their on-job locations by mail.

“My guess is that we’ll be looking at 10, 11, 12 ballots,” said Vanderkamp. “It will not alter the results.”

Watch Martlet.ca for the final electoral count.