At 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, presidential candidate Neal Sales-Griffin makes his way to his work-study job at the library’s front desk. With caution tape and blank wooden planks behind him, the SESP junior sits with his shoulders hunched in front of a library computer, as the beeps of WildCARDs being scanned occasionally pierce the idle chatter.
He will wait more than 45 minutes before he hears the results of the election from commissioner and Weinberg sophomore Jilian Lopez. Though the online polls officially closed at 8 p.m., Sales-Griffin and the other eight candidates running in contested ASG elections have been told that there’s a delay in the vote-counting. For now, they must wait anxiously across campus to see if their fliers, e-mails, Web sites and chalk advertisements have swayed the opinions of the roughly 3,200 Northwestern student voters.
“You voted, right?” Sales-Griffin says to one of the several passers-by whom he recognizes. Friends and acquaintances drop in to give support, and one person leaves him a box of Teddy Grahams.
In the Office of African-American Student Affairs, presidential candidate Mark Crain, academic vice presidential candidate and Weinberg junior Usman Mian, and a dozen of their friends sit around a dark blue table covered in books, laptops, junk food and bottles of soda. They joke around and talk about the places they went to convince students to vote: the Rock, Tech, Allison and Hinman, to name just a few.
“I’m feeling great, I’m really relaxed,” says Crain, a Weinberg junior, but every so often the room becomes completely silent, as its occupants glance at the clock hands moving.
Mian and Crain compulsively twiddle on their cell phones.
At about 9:15 in the library, Sales-Griffin’s iPhone buzzes. Journalists equipped with cameras start snapping away, but the group of about ten people huddling around his desk in impatient silence bursts into laughter when he announces that it’s his uncle on the other end. But minutes later, Sales-Griffin hears the news: With 40.1 percent of the vote, he has become the frontrunner for Thursday’s run-off race.
He grins but plays it cool. Sales-Griffin credits “my team” of campaign contributors for the winning margin. “We put a lot of effort into this,” he says, before quickly adding that “we didn’t win anything right now.”
At 9:20 p.m., Crain’s phone rings. After he hangs up, he reveals that he has won 23.3 percent of the vote and is in the run-off against Sales-Griffin.
“It’s what we’ve been expecting,” Crain says, before breathing out. “Wow. Wow.”
Crain’s campaign manager, SESP junior Max Fletcher, quickly assesses the situation. “I think we can make a lot of ground on this campaign, since there were lots of candidates running as outsiders,” he says. “I think they have more in common with our campaign than with Neal’s campaign.”
Crain later calls Sales-Griffin to talk about the possibility of a Wednesday debate. “Something we definitely wanted to do is challenge Neal to a debate one on one between him and Mark,” Fletcher says. “The last time there was a Counting Crows concert and Nicholas Kristof speaking.”
Sales-Griffin will be home in the South Side of Chicago on Wednesday for family reasons. He doesn’t rule out the chance for a debate, but it “seems doubtful, given my situation,” he says.
Looking ahead to Thursday’s final vote, Sales-Griffin emphasizes his desire to engage students in ASG, and create a sense of community. People whom Sales-Griffin talked to on the campaign trail “had simply been focused on the fact that they had been jaded by ASG, or they didn’t care at all,” he says. “And they were like, tell me, tell me why I should care.”
Because he won’t be on campus to shake hands Wednesday, “now it’s really on the team,” he says. “All my campaign teams are gonna have to mobilize.”
Back in the Office of African-American Student Affairs, discussion has quickly turned to the alleged flier violations — Crain was charged with two, one for posting a flyer on Sheridan Road. He says, “I didn’t see any fliers, and I’ve been running up and down this campus all day.”
But the ringing of Mian’s phone interrupts the talking. It’s bad news. “Wow, she said 61 percent for Mike. I don’t understand how that is,” he says, referring to Mike McGee, who has defeated him in the race for academic vice president.
“I’m just taking it in, seeing what went wrong. My congratulations to Mike,” he says.
The three presidential candidates who finished behind Crain and Sales-Griffin — Weinberg junior Scott Burton, Weinberg junior Blake Yocom and Weinberg sophomore Luke Adams — failed to reach the final round. Burton received 15.1 percent of the vote, Yocom 14.8 and Adams 3.5.
“Of course we’re disappointed,” Burton says afterward, but adds that “we’re really hopeful” that the winning candidate will attend to students’ needs. He says he will stay involved in student affairs “in some way,” noting that he has talked to both Crain and Sales-Griffin about bringing all of the candidates together to pool ideas.
This year’s voter turnout is roughly similar to that of last year’s presidential race between Julian Hill and Jon Webber. Burton finds the voter turnout “really surprising,” saying that it didn’t reflect the buzz he felt was going on around campus. He notes that when he tried to get students online to vote around 1 p.m., the site wasn’t working properly.
Yocom says he thought his campaigning may have mirrored Burton’s too closely. “Scott Burton and I basically ran the same campaign, and we became friends in the process, but I think we kind of split the same kind of supporters.”
“I’m worried that Greeks won’t have a loud advocate on their behalf,” he adds.
Adams says he will run for ASG senator, and will perhaps run again for president next year. “I’m just starting out,” he says. “I’m only a sophomore you know, and I only decided to start my campaign a week before. People like Neal, they’ve been planning their campaign for months. I was just trying at the process. I was just a guy who had ideas. ”
The two-man race for student services vice president will also go to a run-off stage, as neither McCormick sophomore Nate Perkins nor Weinberg junior Hariharan Vijayaraghavannor received the necessary majority to win. Perkins receives 46 percent and Vijayaraghavannor 37.7, while 14.3 percent of votes were of “no confidence.”
McCormick sophomore Vikram Karandikar wins 80.9 percent of the vote in his unopposed race for executive vice president, the official in charge of finances.
“I’m thrilled by the percentage I ended up getting,” Karandikar says. “Me and my campaign manager and my friends have been working really hard to get everything out there, even though [my campaign] has been sort of overlooked because of the presidential election.”
“I think we did a really good job at having people understand that I really am the best man for the job, regardless of the fact that the race was uncontested.”
Photo by Tom Giratikanon / NBN.