An informal e-mail poll conducted by The Dartmouth this weekend shows four of the five candidates for Student Assembly President in a statistical tie for voters' first-place votes. Travis Green '08, Raj Koganti '08, Nova Robinson '08 and Jaromy Siporen '08 each received between 18 and 27 percent of the vote. Only six percent of the 260-plus respondents ranked Carlos Mejia '08 first.
The winner will eventually be decided by instant-runoff voting, an iterated process of eliminating candidates with the fewest votes. After each round of elimination, the votes for the eliminated candidates will be reallocated based on voters' rankings.
Official voting will be held Monday and Tuesday, ending an intense and unusually short campaign period for candidates.
"I have never been more busy in my life," Siporen said.
The length of the campaign period in this year's election was shortened by several days -- a change made by the Elections Planning and Advisory Committee at the recommendation of Dartmouth administrators.
"We thought keeping things short would keep the campaigns respectful and eliminate the potential for things to get dirty," EPAC Chair Kevin Hudak '07 said.
Before this weekend, EPAC had issued only informal warnings to candidates for rule violations. However, EPAC is currently investigating a more serious sanction against Koganti.
On Saturday, Koganti sent out an e-mail message with a suppressed recipient list, outlining his platform and encouraging those who received the message to vote for him. According to EPAC guidelines, e-mails to recipients whom the candidates do not know -- particularly messages with suppressed recipient lists -- are forbidden.
Hudak said that a hearing to settle the matter would be held on Monday.
When The Dartmouth spoke with Koganti on Sunday, he said that he and Hudak had yet to discuss the possible sanction in depth.
Most candidates expressed satisfaction with the success of the campaigning period, despite its shortened length.
"As campaigns get longer I don't know that you get all that much more [out of them]," Mejia said.
Robinson however, expressed some regret at the lost time.
"I haven't had as much time to connect with as many people as I would have liked -- especially freshmen," Robinson said.
Green said he was unhappy with the election processes' late start this year. As a result of what Hudak referred to as "transition problems" in an earlier interview with The Dartmouth, this year's election is several weeks behind the contest's usual time frame -- a delay which Green thinks negatively affected his campaign.
"I was the only campaign ready to go at the beginning of this term," Green said. "If this campaign had started on time it would have been very different."
Candidates were out in full force this weekend. Several went door-to-door in dormitories in an attempt to gain support, while others performed circuits at Greek houses.
At one point during her efforts, Robinson joined in a game of "Truth or Dare" which was being held as part of a hall meeting in the Choates residential cluster.
The social networking website Facebook.com has also played a prominent role in this year's campaign. Each candidate has his own Facebook group, with Koganti's group leading in number of members as of Sunday evening. With 136 members, his group boasted over two-and-a-half times as many supporters as Mejia's 50-member group, the smallest.
Koganti downplayed the significance of the group's popularity.
"If you take any marketing strategy people respond differently when you interview them [than] in the marketplace," he said.
Both Siporen and Robinson created their own groups, while credit for the creation of the other three candidates' groups go to their supporters.
"I thought that a Facebook group would be the most effective way to distribute my platform to the campus as a whole," Siporen said of his decision to make the group.
Siporen also commented on the diversity of this year's field, pointing to the presence of only one female candidate as the group's main deficiency.
"The diversity of this year's candidate race has been great," Siporen said. "We represent extremely different facets of campus."
Green, however, had a different take, noting that many of the candidates know each other socially outside of the current contest.
"This campus has kind of one big group," Green said. "We're all in this connected group. There are external groups which we don't draw from very well."
