Colton Becker and Mehraz Rahman will be the next student body president and vice president after winning the executive alliance runoff election following a revote after the initial results were nullified.
Becker and Rahman received 8250 votes — the highest number of votes in UT history, according to the ESB — or 56.18 percent of the vote. Candidates Guneez Ibrahim and Hannah McMorris secured 43.67 percent of the vote with 6413 votes.
“I feel relieved that it’s over but also excited for what’s to come,” Rahman said. “There’s a lot of work to be done in terms of addressing campus climate…now it’s part of our job to help address that.”
BREAKING: The @ColtonMehraz18 campaign has won the executive alliance runoff. pic.twitter.com/Tvpm7ycv1F
— The Daily Texan (@thedailytexan) March 22, 2018
The team will start reuniting the campus by reaching out to followers of the Ibrahim-McMorris campaign, Becker said.
“We just have a lot of work to do mending the wounds of this election,” Becker said. “I’m glad it’s over, and we want to start reaching out ot the other side of the aisle.”
Candidates faced a prolonged campaign with a total of three elections, the first of which was nullified and the second resulted in a runoff that led to tonight’s final election.
Ibrahim and McMorris rallied their supporters with the message that marginalized voices on campus will be heard.
“We didn’t need to win this election to win,” Ibrahim said. “This was a message that needed to happen on this campus at some point; black students, brown students, queer students, most marginalized groups on our campus have been ignored systematically. This is a perfect example of it considering the harassment and the threats and the physical assaults that Hannah and I have had to deal with the past six weeks.
“It’s not over," she added. "It’s just the beginning, because now people are paying attention.”
The Election Supervisory Board issued multiple sanctions throughout the three campaign periods, including two personal moratoriums earlier today against Ibrahim and Becker that prohibited each of them from campaigning for several hours.
According to a ruling from the ESB, Ibrahim was prohibited from campaigning from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. due to a Class B campaign violation after retweeting several tweets endorsing her and McMorris during spring break, when campaigning was prohibited by the ESB.
Meanwhile, Becker was prohibited from campaigning from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. because he gave a “love-reaction” to a Facebook post that accused the Guneez-Hannah campaign of being complicit in anti-Semitic rhetoric, which the ESB considered verbal harassment, also a Class B violation.
The first election on March 1 intensified when the ESB issued a moratorium against the Ibrahim-McMorris alliance for campaigning in a “knowingly deceptive” manner. Hours later, Colton and Mehraz were declared the winners of the election, but the results were soon declared invalid by SG Supreme Court, which found the moratorium against the Ibrahim-McMorris campaign to be wrongfully issued.
In the days following, the Dean of Students called for a new election, which took place March 7 and 8. When no executive alliance secured the majority during that election, the Ibrahim-McMorris and Colton-Mehraz campaigns headed for a runoff in their third and final election.