Bautista, Fallon win USG presidential election

All of the USG senate candidates were elected by default after Mason Yonover was disqualified from the race in a Feb. 20 opinion from the judicial council.

By ASIANA GUANG
USG president-elect Mikaela Bautista and vice president-elect Emma Fallon posing in January.
Mikaela Bautista and Emma Fallon earned 1,327 votes to win, securing 36.7% of the total votes, after the third round of voting. (Henry Kofman / Daily Trojan)

Mikaela Bautista and Emma Fallon have been elected president and vice president of the 2025-26 Undergraduate Student Government with 1,327 votes, securing 36.7% of the total votes, after all rounds of ranked choice voting.

The pair ran on a platform focused on starting, continuing and concluding initiatives to create meaningful and lasting benefits for the student body. Their proposals included acquiring an opt-in ChatGPT+ account for all students, extending Doheny Memorial Library hours and increasing USG transparency.


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Bautista and Fallon won in the third round of USG’s ranked-choice voting system — first implemented in last year’s general election — where the ticket with the least amount of votes is eliminated and their votes get redistributed each round until a pair earns a majority of the remaining votes.

(Sean Campbell / Daily Trojan)

3,620 undergraduate students voted this year — 17.2% of the undergraduate student body — compared to 4,306 voters last year.

Jeremiah Boisrond, Sudeepta Murthy, Andrew Cardenas, Justin Shih, Sabeeh Mirza, Jad Kilani, Kevin Hoang, Kian Salek, Dakota Driemeyer, Karim Debian, Zehran Muqtadir and Moy Valdez were elected as senators by default as the only 12 remaining candidates after Mason Yonover was disqualified from the race in a Feb. 20 opinion from the judicial council.

(Sean Campbell / Daily Trojan)

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