USG race ends in Edwin-Austin victory

The Undergraduate Student Government announced that USG Program Board Finance Director Edwin Saucedo and USG Director of University Affairs Austin Dunn are the winners of their presidential election during Tuesday’s Senate meeting.

The Edwin-Austin ticket received 2,328, or 63.1 percent, of the votes, a 41 percent margin of victory over the rival ticket Charlie Henriquez and Cole Pham. Their ticket gained 834 votes, or 22.6 percent of the total.

Newly elected USG President Edwin Saucedo was excited over his win and thanked his supporters.

“We’re really excited for what’s to come, and we’re grateful for all the support we got from everyone and from our campaign team. We’re just happy to enjoy this moment,” Saucedo said. “I think opening our student government to the student body to show that we’re working for the student body. We need to make a difference to all of USC.”

Saucedo’s running mate and new USG Vice President Austin Dunn was proud of the win despite a lower than expected voter turnout. He highlighted the transparency of their campaign as a key to their victory.

“The voter turnout was a little bit lower than we expected, but we did as hard as we could,” Dunn said. “We ran a clean campaign; we were true to ourselves the entire time, very transparent, so this is just the icing on top of the cake. I’m super stoked for next year.”

Saucedo and Dunn expressed gratitude for their campaign team and supporters.

“Getting the team was the hard part, and getting a team that represented the whole student body or at least tapped into different communities. We don’t want it to look all the same,” Saucedo said.

Henriquez was satisfied with his campaign.

“It is what it is. I think we ran a great campaign,” Henriquez said. “We definitely stood out. We brought a different campaigning method to the student body. We ran hard; we called out everything we needed to call out.”

The senatorial election results were also announced during the meeting. The ballot options changed this year; instead of voters choosing three greek senators, three commuter senators and six residential senators, the constituencies were discarded, and senatorial candidates ran uncategorized.

The 12 Senators elected out of 20 candidates were Daniel Million, Paul Samaha, Josh Lurie, Daniel Newman, Kate Oh, Tyler Matheson, Alanna Schenk, Sabrina Enriquez, Tiffany Lian, Emily Lee, Tingyee Chang and Leena Danpour.

Samaha promised to continue his advocacy for students and support issues in the face of an unresponsive administration.

“I’m excited to continue working on the projects I’m advocating for and also bringing some new projects to the forefront of USG,” Samaha said. “To make sure mental health and college affordability remain two issues we students continue to press the administration on.”

Results were announced by Associate Director of Election and Recruitment Logan Dallas. Dallas said 3,700 votes were cast this election. In last year’s election, 6,027 votes were cast. Despite this, she said she wasn’t concerned about voter turnout.

“I’m excited for all the candidates that ran. It takes a lot of courage and a lot of work to do this; I’m really proud of everyone regardless of whether they got elected or not,” Dallas said. “Voting is down, but the passion of the people running is up, so I think they’re going to continue this trend of student engagement and making sure issues matter to students.”

Current USG President Rini Sampath was nostalgic over the process and had a positive outlook for the future of USG.

“I’m so excited for candidates that participated; it’s an exhilarating experience in and of itself, and of course for the candidate who won,” Sampath said. “I know it’s an incredible feeling to put all this work into something and reap the reward. I’m hopeful for the future of our organization and to see this kind of engagement from our campus.”