The Elections Governance Board made its final report to the USG senate Wednesday night, highlighting both the board’s achievements as well as those areas in which it fell short, offering suggestions for improving the quality of future USG elections.The board is charged with coordinating and supervising each year’s elections.In their report, Mary Paster and Chad Rothbart, the board’s co-directors, outlined what their goals were for the last election cycle and then detailed how well those goals were achieved.The board’s objectives were two-fold: getting someone to run for every office and every seat and increasing voter turnout over the last year’s elections, according to the report.Their first goal went unfulfilled. While the presidential/vice presidential race was hotly contested, many of the other races for USG Senate positions generated little or no interest. In at least one case, the Health Sciences representative, the board has been unable to declare a winner; five people have created an unbreakable tie with a single vote each.”We had a lot of people at the potential candidate meetings this year, but we lost them,” Paster and Rothbart wrote in their report. “Many people didn’t follow through with filing petitions and we had to reject two candidates who didn’t have proper petitions.”To improve this, the pair suggested holding potential candidate meetings earlier in the year as well as following up with phone calls to every person who had expressed interest to answer any questions they may have with the petitioning process.Candidates are required to present petitions with a certain number of student signatures to get their names on the ballot. That process can sometimes be confusing, Paster said.One of the biggest surprises in this year’s election was also the board’s biggest success.More than twice the number of students voted this year as did last, the report showed. This was attributed to several factors, including the amount of campaigning done by the presidential/vice presidential teams, increased media coverage, fair weather and a substantial increase in Web voting.This success, coupled with the $628 budget surplus reported by the board, drew praise from USG members.”These two did an outstanding job. They were pulled into the game late and performed tremendously,” said Greg Krabacher, USG vice president.