Winners propelled by personality
In an election campaign season that featured little disagreement and candidates that many felt were hard to tell apart, the results in the presidential and vice-presidential races could hardly have been more disparate. Frode Eilertsen '99 won the Student Assembly presidency in a runaway, while Nahoko Kawakyu '99 took the vice presidency in a nail-biter. But while their margins of victory were different, both Eilertsen and Kawakyu share one very important thing -- they were propelled to victory in large part because of their personalities. Not much variety Many of the issues were the same -- for example, reforming the Assembly, making it more representative and increasing its influence over the administration. Furthermore, a lot of the candidates for Assembly president and vice president had worked closely with each other in the past, and may have been reluctant to engage in aggressive campaigns against one another. As current Assembly President Jon Heavey '97 put it, there "wasn't a whole lot of variety on the ballot." There was a clear separation between presidential write-in candidates Unai Montes-Irueste '98 and Kathy Kim '00 and the two candidates on the ballot, Eilertsen and Scott Jacobs '99. The write-ins combined for just over 12 percent of the total, while Jacobs and Eilertsen combined for almost 80 percent of the vote. Perhaps the biggest mystery of the election is how Eilertsen and Jacobs -- who orchestrated campaigns of similar proportions and ran on many of the same issues -- were separated by more than 600 votes and 40 percentage points. "I'm shocked that it was so lopsided," Jacobs said.