Finley/Hill elected ASSU Executives

John-Lancaster Finley (left) and Brandon Hill (right) will be the new ASSU Executives.

John-Lancaster Finley ’16 and Brandon Hill ’16 will be the new ASSU President and Vice President, respectively, the ASSU elections commission announced Saturday afternoon at CoHo.

In the final round of the ranked-choice balloting, Finley/Hill defeated the slate of Nikos Liodakis ’16 and Dottie Jones ’16 by a 102-vote difference, 1,797 to 1,695. The slate of Joe Troderman ’16 and Nitish Kulkarni ’16, “Divest from ASSU,” finished third. The slate of Mason Stricklin-Elam ’16 and Cassidy Elwood ’16, “Paradigm Shift,” finished fourth.

The elections commission also announced the results for the Undergraduate Senate, Graduate Student Council, annual grant and class presidential elections.

All groups that sought funding through the annual grant ballot process won their request, with the exception of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, the Inter-Fraternity Council, the Stanford Golf League, the Stanford Transhumanist Association, Club Sports and the Stanford Speakers Bureau.

Club Sports and the Stanford Speakers Bureau were petitioning for money from both the graduate and undergraduate student body. The reason their funding requests failed was that they could not secure “yes” votes from 15 percent of the combined student body.

The winning candidates for the ASSU Senate are Justice Tention ’18, Sina Javidan-Nejad ’17, Gabriel Knight ’17, Molly Horwitz ’16, John Luttig ’17, TG Sido ’18, Malcolm Lizzappi ’17, Hattie Gawande ’18, Mehraan Keval ’18, Eni Asebiomo ’18, Matthew Cohen ’18, David Wintermeyer ’17, Jasmin Espinosa ’18, Leo Bird ’17 and Cenobio Hernandez ’18. The lowest number of votes required to win a seat this year was 744. The closest runner-up who did not win a seat got 737 votes. This candidate was one of three who came within 20 votes of capturing a seat on the Senate.

Perennial joke candidate Senator Palpatine won 133 write-in votes for the Senate.

The seniors elected the slate “Sixteeniors” to be their class president, while the juniors elected the slate “Six Flags.” The sophomores elected the slate “Mem Squad” to be their class presidents.

A partial list of the winning candidates was available for the Graduate Student Council, though a couple of write-in candidate winners were pending as of the announcement. The confirmed winners are Sam Bydlon Ph.D. ’17, Jieyang Jia B.S. ’13 M.S. ’13 Ph.D. ’19, Isamar Rosa, Gabriel Rodriguez M.A. ’14 Ph.D. ’15, Qian Lin, Yiran Duan, Eddy Albarran B.S. ’13 Ph.D. ’20, Rujia Jiang, Dorian Bertsch B.A. ’10 MBA ’16, Jingyi Li, David Hsu, Trevor Martin and Gabriela Badica.

Finley said that the announcement was full of tension. “I also just remember how close the vote count was, because they announced the vote count before who had won, and so we were all just about to have a heart attack, the minute they said how close it was. I never saw an Exec race that close.”

“We’re incredibly honored to have been elected to serve this year, we’re super excited for it. I think we have an awesome year ahead,” Finley later said. “There are so many feelings about Stanford right now — people are feeling down about Stanford and I’ve seen people saying that because of this year, the life feels drained out of Stanford. We’re excited for the life to come back, we’re excited to engage with the student body, and take on some of these issues while not just draining our souls.”

This article has been updated. 

Contact Caleb Smith at caleb17 ‘at’ stanford.edu.