Bautista, Fallon elected as USG president, vice president
Students cast 3,620 votes in the election, approximately a 16% decrease from last year.
By ASIANA GUANG
Mikaela Bautista and Emma Fallon were announced as the 2025-26 Undergraduate Student Government president and vice president at the senate meeting Tuesday night. The ticket earned 1,327 votes, 36.7% of the total votes, after all rounds of ranked-choice voting.
Chief justice Susanna Andryan announced that undergraduate students cast 3,620 votes this year compared to 4,306 in last year’s general election. Just over 17% of the undergraduate student body voted, an approximately 16% decrease in voter turnout compared to last year. Voting took place from Feb. 18 to Feb. 23.
(Sean Campbell / Daily Trojan)
The pair ran on a platform focused on starting, continuing and concluding initiatives that would create meaningful and lasting benefits for the student body. Their proposals included acquiring an opt-in ChatGPT Plus account for all students, extending Doheny Memorial Library’s hours and increasing USG’s transparency to students.
“We really put our all into this campaign, into this election, and it’s just so exciting that we’re going to be able to work on everything that we have been thinking of for the past two months,” Bautista said in an interview with the Daily Trojan after the meeting.
Fallon said, as vice president, she wants to bring spirit to USG and bridge the gap between USG and the student body.
Daily headlines, sent straight to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with the latest at and around USC.
“We have good momentum right now to do that because people say that they only care about USG during election season, but we want to keep [bridging the gap] and find ways to connect with the student body,” Fallon said after the meeting.
Bautista said the ticket’s top priority is providing Recognized Student Organizations with resources and workshops to navigate the recognition process.
“After speaking with so many RSOs during the campaign, we really got to understand what happened last semester,” Bautista said. “We just want to make sure that all RSOs feel prepared [and] confident and are excited to table the involvement fair and get into recruitment season right away.”
Due to decreasing voter turnout, Andryan said the judicial council had brainstormed ways to improve in the future, such as sending mass email reminders throughout the voting period, making voting stations clearer for passersby and spreading more information about USG.
Four tickets ran during this election cycle: Bautista and Fallon, Ali Bhatti and Chichi Makasi, John Breitfelder and Gwen O’Beacain, and Heydy Vasquez and Elijah Barnes.
This was the second year USG elections utilized a ranked-choice voting system for its presidential and vice presidential races. The ticket with the least amount of votes is eliminated at the end of each round, and their votes get redistributed to the voters’ next-highest ranked choice until a pair earns a majority of the remaining votes.
Bautista and Fallon led the race after all three rounds, with Bhatti and Makasi coming in a close second with 1,234 votes after three rounds.
Breitfelder and O’Beacain finished in third, while Vasquez and Barnes placed fourth.
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 given there were as many seats as candidates. A 13th candidate, Mason Yonover, was disqualified from the race in a Feb. 20 opinion from the judicial council.
(Sean Campbell / Daily Trojan)
Senators for the 2024-25 academic year also unanimously passed senate bill 144-28, which amended USG’s $2.5 million budget for the spring to ensure USG funds are being accurately used to their highest potential and ensure students can benefit from available resources.
Some of these budget changes included reducing student stipends from $382,900 to $357,063 and increasing the Concerts Committee budget from $545,000 to $568,344.
In her report, chief financial officer Chisom Obioha said the funding department has funded over 100 RSOs and individual students this year while meeting their goal of exhausting the budget.
Chief programming officer Hunter Black recapped the First Generation Leadership Summit dinner last Friday and presented upcoming events such as the Asian Pacific American Student Assembly Cultural Arts Expo and the International Student Assembly Field Day.
