Upperclassmen least likely to vote
The Observer Staff Report
The older the Notre Dame undergraduate, the less likely he is to vote in a student body election. And if he does, the more likely he is to cast an abstention ballot.
That's according to results from Monday's general election that set up a runoff today between the tickets of Pat Hallahan-Jeremy Lao and Charlie Ebersol-Lauren Meagher.
About half the undergraduate student population – 4,055 – voted in the school's first election conducted entirely online. Hallahan's ticket received about 28 percent of the vote, while Ebersol's captured some 21 percent.
The freshman class turned out most, with 1,310 first-year students – 32 percent of the voters Monday – participating.
From there, turnout decreased as class year increased. Election organizers counted 1,211 votes from sophomores, 950 from juniors and 579 from seniors. Only five fifth-year students voted.
Upperclassmen, though, were more prone to vote to abstain than their younger counterparts. Twenty percent of fifth-year students – one voter – abstained, but with only five voters for the entire class, four of the seven tickets running for office also received one vote each.
The trend is more evident, percentage-wise, in the four other classes. For seniors, 5.4 percent, or 31, voted to abstain. Thirty-nine juniors clicked abstain in the online poll, but because the class turned out in greater numbers than the seniors did, the figure represents just 4.1 percent of voting juniors. Just 26 sophomores, or 2.1 percent of the class, voted to abstain. And the 20 freshmen who did the same made up 1.5 percent of their class' voters.
Among on-campus voting results, Badin and Carroll halls, two of the smallest dorms, had the lowest turnout. Sixty-six women from Badin voted, while 68 of Carroll's men did.
Lewis and Stanford halls cast the most votes. Women's hall Lewis claimed 194 voters, while men's dorm Stanford, where vice presidential candidate Jeremy Lao lives, had 191 of its residents vote.
Typically, residence halls where candidates are from have the highest turnout. Presidential hopefuls Ebersol and Hallahan brought out 181 and 103 voters from Keough and Sorin halls, respectively. Ebersol's running mate Meagher lives off campus, but her impact on off-campus constituents is unclear because election organizers lumped the 472 abroad and off-campus student voters under one category.
Among those abroad and off-campus voters, however, Ebersol and Meagher captured 18.2 percent of ballots. Hallahan and Lao received 16.7 percent of the vote. The Joe Muto-Mimi Matkowski ticket, which narrowly missed making the run-off election, claimed nearly a third of abroad and off-campus votes.
In typical fashion, the remaining candidates were most popular in their own residence halls.
Ebersol received 46 percent of Keough's vote, while Hallahan and Lao got just 14 percent. In Sorin, only 23 people didn't vote for Hallahan and Lao, and of those, just five voted for Ebersol and Meagher. Likewise, in Stanford, Hallahan-Lao took 93 votes to Ebersol-Meagher's 15.
It's unclear how the match up between the last tickets standing will play out in today's runoff.
Ebersol has said he would work to gain the support of Muto-Matkowski and Mike Bott-Mike Kirsh, who polled fourth in Monday's election, because their platforms are similar to his and Meagher's.
Matkowski, though, has publicly endorsed Hallahan-Lao. And Bott and Kirsh have said they won't send their voters the way of either remaining campaign.
The other former hopefuls – Ryan Gagnet-John McCarthy, Drew Updike-Eric Tarnowski and David Rail-Matt Padberg – who polled behind the rest of their opponents Monday, aren't likely to make endorsements.
Keeping with their sneering campaign that poked fun at student government, Gagnet-McCarthy said they would endorse themselves for office next year. In perhaps the most blatant sign that voters too are jaded with student leaders and their campaign promises, nearly 10 percent – that's 392 students – voted for Gagnet and McCarthy.
But they weren't jaded enough to vote for Rail-Padberg, who ran a so-called joke campaign on the sole issue of boosting Flex Points for students. The ticket received just 18 votes.
By comparison, a total of 117 students voted to abstain.
All News Stories for Thursday, February 13, 2003
