Ryan Rinaldi and his ticket, Future TU, defeated competing ticket RepresenTU Thursday afternoon in the election for the next Temple Student Government administration.
Joining Rinaldi on the Future TU ticket were Brittany Boston and Binh Nguyen for vice presidents of services and external affairs, respectively. RepresenTU was headed by candidate for student body president Amber O’Brien and vice presidential candidates Aaliyah Ahmad and Tyler Sewell.
Future TU gathered 66.3 percent of the vote with a total of 3,042 votes cast, almost doubling RepresenTU’s total of 1,537 votes.
“It’s been a long time coming,” Rinaldi said about his ticket’s win. “To see everyone working so hard, to see the turnout, which was incredible and you can commend Ray [Smerigilo] and of course Amber [O’Brien]’s team as well, but just seeing the excitement when we won, it’s good to see [our hard work] pay off.”
Nguyen said that her first reaction when hearing Future TU’s victory was just “wow.”
“I’m just so speechless,” Nguyen said. “This has just been the most rewarding experience. We’re all proud and so honored to be here and to advocate on behalf of Temple students. We’re all just smiling and we can’t stop.”
O’Brien said that while the loss was disappointing, her team plans to stay involved around the university.
“We plan on talking actions on our initiatives regardless of whether or not we’re in office,” she said.
This year’s elections bucked the previous three election cycles of decreasing voter turnout with 17 percent of the student body casting votes or 4,582 votes total. Last year’s election only garnered 6 percent of the student body vote for 1,716 votes, while the 2013 elections received 2,075 votes and 2012 seeing 2,647 votes cast.
Voting was open to students online uvote.temple.edu from March 31 to April 1. The winning ticket was announced to a small gathering of TSG representatives, including the candidates, inside the TSG office in the Student Center.
“An institution of this size is usually around 10 percent, so our goal for voter turnout this year was 10 percent,” Elections Commissioner Inella Ray said. “We made a personal goal of 12 percent, but clearly we passed that. Hopefully we can get up to 20 percent next year.”
Ray went on to say that voter turnout was due to an increase in voting events and advertisements to reach out to as many people as possible.
Inauguration for the new TSG administration will be held April 27.
David Glovach can be reached at david.glovach@temple.edu and on Twitter @DavidGlovach.
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