After the postponement of election results, it was announced last night that Suzanne Scharer and Matt Kreiner were elected the new president and vice president for the Undergraduate Student Government.

“Students can see that we were the best candidates because we had a very strong message,” Scharer said. “We had a large, 500-student network that really believed in our message and it was those 500 students who really helped us get out the vote.”

About 150 students turned out to hear the election results, which were postponed for a day because of a judicial panel review of charges brought against Scharer. She said the violations had to do with “buying votes with donuts” at a close proximity to a polling station. Charges were dropped automatically Monday night after the filer of the charges, Patrick Kennedy, failed to show up. No details are known about Kennedy, said Kara Silverman, director of the Elections Governance Board.

“If there is a judicial panel hearing, even though we know it won’t have an impact, we have to postpone it,” Silverman said. “If there are any undecided violations we can’t announce the election, even if it won’t change the winner.”

Voter turnout in this year’s election increased by 4 percent, a figure that surprised many of the candidates and former USG members.

“I think from tonight what I’m most proud of is that voter turnout went up from … 16 to 20 percent of our students,” said Aftab Pureval, current USG president.

“We weren’t expecting (voter turnout) to be that high,” Scharer said. “I don’t know if it’s related to the three-week-long campaign or just the energy and the passion and the drive all of the candidates had, but we’re very excited. The students spoke and they chose us.”

The team of Scharer and Kreiner received 37.9 percent of the total vote, exceeding the total of the nearest runners-up – Liz Ghandakly and Dave Knapp – by 1,065 votes, the largest margin in the election.

“We definitely thought it was going to be a closer race between us and Ghandakly-Knapp,” Scharer said. “When we heard last week about the high voter turnout we thought, ‘Who is bringing out these large voter blocks?’. We really thought it could have been anyone’s game.”

The team of Ghandakly and Knapp were the runners-up in the election, taking 21.9 percent of the vote.

“It was a good campaign and I’m happy about what we did,” Ghandakly said. “It didn’t turn out the way we wanted, but it was a good experience.

“A lot of the candidates ran on changing USG and (Scharer) ran almost as an incumbent. Next year’s USG will be the same as this year’s. There will still be a lack of visibility of USG and a lack of communication with students. I think some of the disappointments will be continued from this year.”

The presidential team of Tariq and Malik Seifullah came in third place with 16.7 percent of the vote.

“We have 1,100 people voting for us, so I won 1,100 votes that I didn’t have before and I can’t feel bad about that,” said Tariq Seifullah, who plans to continue working with USG.

As the outgoing USG president, Pureval expressed his feelings on the candidates and how he feels about leaving his presidential position.

“There’s definitely a part of me that’s sad to go, but I think that USG really did a good job this year,” Pureval said. “We worked hard on issues such as safety and tuition. I’m confident they will continue to serve the students well.

“I think that each individual team had its own strengths, and this team’s strength was definitely its experience and definitely the breadth of issues they had a firm understanding of. From this new administration I see really good things and hopefully they will continue to push these types of issues that have been talked about in the previous years such as (general education curriculum) reform, lowering the number of hours to graduate and really focusing in on undergraduate academics.”

Silverman said there was a normal influx of violations in this year’s election. However, violations against several candidates were frequently talked about during the election.

“I felt that some of the violations are petty, and some were due to the animosity between two different groups,” Seifullah said, declining to name the two groups he was referring to.

Scharer, who was a particular target of violation scrutiny, said she had a clean conscience despite the allegations levied at her during the election season.

“People say all press is good press, but certainty students view us differently because of the violations,” Scharer said. “We were cleared of all charges and students know that. But there’s still that idea of slander and liable in the back of their minds. We didn’t do it. We’re not going to do it. But what we are going to do is speak strongly on behalf of students.

“We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. We have a senate to work with, a cabinet to form and administrators to start to get to work with. Matt and I have a lot of pet projects and a lot of initiatives that we need to get started by the end of this month.”