Dani Rivera and Kwame Osei were elected student council president and vice-president on Thursday evening, winning 54 percent of the vote in an election that drew the highest turnout since MU moved to online voting.
The elections committee announced the results in the main hall shortly after 6 p.m., following a day in which 72 percent of eligible students cast ballots — up from 58 percent last year. The rival ticket of Lena Vogel and Marcus Idowu received 41 percent, with the remainder blank or spoiled.
We asked people what they were tired of, and then we wrote it down and called it a platform. That’s really the whole story.
Dani Rivera, president-elect
Rivera, a junior, campaigned on reforming the club-funding process, publishing council meeting minutes within 48 hours, and extending common-room hours during examination weeks. Osei, a sophomore, led the ticket’s outreach to first-year students, which committee members credited for much of the turnout jump.
“First-years usually vote at the lowest rate because nobody asks them to,” said elections committee chair Robert Lin. “This year both tickets ran first-year events, and it shows in the numbers.”
What happens next
The new council takes office at the start of next term. Rivera told MU Student News her first priority is the funding reform already under discussion in the current council, which she supported as a class representative. “The draft exists. Our job is to finish it, not to start over,” she said.
Vogel congratulated the winners in a statement and said she intends to remain active in the council as a senior representative. “The ideas don’t disappear because the ticket lost,” she wrote.
Full results by class year will be published by the elections committee alongside the official record of the vote. The current council meets twice more before the handover.
How the campaign was run
The three-week campaign stayed notably civil by recent standards, a fact both tickets attributed to the elections committee’s new debate format: two moderated debates with questions submitted anonymously by students and drawn at random. The second debate’s most-discussed exchange concerned cafeteria pricing — an issue neither ticket had planned to run on, and which both now say will appear on the new council’s agenda.
Campaign spending, capped for the first time this year, was published by the committee alongside the results: both tickets spent within a few percent of the limit, mostly on printed posters, which Lin drily noted “remain undefeated as election technology.”
