So, now some of the dust has settled, I want to quickly sum up my thoughts about the election this year.

For the most part, these elections seemed to be a lot quieter than last year – I often could get into the Union without being harassed by members of the Campaign teams floating about, though it did seem as if most of them knew me anyway, so didn’t bother wasting my time when they knew I had voted. Poster presence was less so then last year, but then again, with less candidates, that was expected. I’m not really gonna go any more into the actual polling days itself, my fellow blogger David Morris has a good account of the elections this year, you can find them here (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

I wanted to really just mention my thoughts on the candidates that got elected – I think some interesting people got elected. Note that the Presidential results have not been announced yet due to controversy, as I mentioned in my last post. So, without further ado, here we go:

VP Community
Ben Wilcox

Ben was always a popular character, and had a lot of experience in the role of community, as he demonstrated at Hustings. He had some pretty solid ideas for what he wanted to do with Societies and HUSSO/SCA. He is also a level-headed bloke and fairly open minded when it comes to politics (or that’s the impression I get anyway)

VP Welfare
Alice Marshall

While Alice was the only candidate for the job – knowing Alice fairly well, I knew she would be good at the job, as a member of the exec of the Drama soc, and a keen interest in the running of the Union. It was a shame that this election wasn’t contested, but then again, I can’t really think of a better candidate.

VP Sport
James “Wayne” Kerr

I don’t know much about James, but he did well, considering he won by 9 votes in the end. Only time will tell what will happen here.

VP Education
Chris Marks

So, as a position I essentially ran for last year, I was interested to see what would happen here. As you can see, Chris Marks won – an Education Not For Sale activist. I don’t agree with most of his views, especially for the fact he wants to use VP Ed as a campaigning role, which is fine, but try to decrease the number of committees? While I agree with the sentiment, I believe that removing representatives from committees will only harm relations with the University and will lose vital student input.

However, I applaud Chris’ solid viewpoints, most candidates have policies that are fairly vague, yet I know Chris will do what he said he wants to do – he doesn’t lie. At the same time, I do like the guy, I get on with him quite well, and I respect his views, and  I believe he respects mine. Good luck to him, I look forward to seeing the 24 hour library campaign really start picking up now!

President
???

So, who will the final Sabb be? I’m gonna hold my tongue about this ‘till we know what happened, but I’ll be back with views on the president and what I think of the team as a whole after the election appeals committee meets and decides the fate of the candidates!

So, it’s thst time again. This time last year, I was waiting for the results of the election that I was taking part in, which I came in second in the Vice President (Academic Representation) election. This year, I’m sat here, sipping my Guinness, with my laptop, ready to blog about developments…

And what a development that has occurred!

The Presidential campaign, which I thought had been relatively clean, has been overshadowed by controversy, apparently, one of the candidates have been disqualified, pending appeal. As such, the winner of the Presidential election won’t be announced tonight.

I plan on blogging about the whole election period as it happens/over the next day or two, but for now, I wanted to mention this…

Interesting…