Correction appended
Updated, 1:09 a.m.
Bill Pulte and Mike McGee will advance to a run-off for the ASG presidency on Friday.
With Medill junior Pulte receiving 48.6 percent of the vote and Communication junior McGee receiving 47.9 percent, neither candidate had the majority required to win under ASG rules. Weinberg junior Luke Adams had 2 percent of the vote. McGee and Pulte were separated by only 33 votes, with McGee receiving 2,116 and Pulte receiving 2,149 votes. Adams received a total of 94 votes.
In the day’s two other races, Matt Bellassai won the race for director of student life with 80.6 percent of the vote. Muhammad Safdari won the race for academic director with 84.4 percent. Both candidates ran unopposed.
ASG Election Commissioner Paul David Shrader announced the results at a Senate meeting on Wednesday evening. A record 4,421 students submitted eligible votes, Shrader said. Last year, approximately 3,200 students voted in the first round of voting.
Though polls were slated to close at 7 p.m., the ASG election commission extended voting by two hours after ASG’s Web site went down in the late afternoon.
“I wish we had won it,” Pulte said from his office in Pi Kappa Alpha, where he and more than 15 supporters had awaited the results until 10:05 p.m. “It looks like we’re going to have to play ball.”
“You can definitely tell the student population is excited about our ticket,” Pulte said of the record turnout. “I think it’s a testament to the campaign we’re running.”
Mike McGee and about 25 supporters heard the results in the seminar room of the Public Affairs Residential College, where McGee lived his freshman and sophomore year.
“We wish it’d been over tonight but it’s not, so we got to keep going,” McGee said.
“Definitely very bittersweet,” said McGee’s running mate Tommy Smithburg. “I definitely wanted to close the deal tonight, go home, start getting ready for a new administration, catch up on homework that I haven’t done yet this quarter. But two more full days of work, that’s exciting. We just gotta make sure we get out there.”
McGee said the closeness of the race didn’t surprise him. “We definitely had similar platforms.”
When asked if he was expecting a race this close, Pulte replied, “Not really.”
Update: A graphic on this article originally stated the write-in candidate as Vickie Humps. The name was actually Dickie Humps. North by Northwestern regrets the error.