Two weeks of ground campaigning, four grievances and 6,269 votes later, One Oregon executive candidates Zach Rentschler, Tori Ganahl and Adam Sharf are going head to head with I’m with UO candidates Quinn Haaga, Natalie Fisher and Zach Lusby in a runoff election.
I’m with UO came out of the general election with a slight lead in votes. Haaga says her priority is to “keep running a clean campaign.”
Haaga is the presidential candidate for I’m with UO. (Taylor Wilder/Emerald)
As an executive ticket, that’s something I definitely want to enforce and make sure that we are doing everything by the book and [being] honest with the students,” Haaga said.
Haaga, who has been involved with two other ASUO elections, said more students are aware of the election because “all three campaigns are very strong” and they put forth all the open seats. She also said the usage of social media contributed to the high voter turnout. Last year, the top two executive tickets received 2,733 votes in the general election compared to 4,362 in this year’s.
“I definitely expected that we would do well, but didn’t expect that we would do this well,” Haaga said. “[The reason is] because our campaign is very honest and down to earth. Our message is very tangible and easy for students to connect with. We are not throwing out these flashy ideas. That allows students to connect with our campaign.”
I’m with UO is the only campaign in this election without any grievances filed against it. One Oregon has had three.
“All these rules are put in place for a reason — the elections board wants the election to be as fair as possible,” Haaga said. “If you are not following these rules, you can’t really say you stand for these values.”
One Oregon’s executive ticket came in second in the general election, with almost 300 fewer votes. Rentschler said the campaign will focus on exploring new connections.
“Turnout was high this year, but over 70 percent of students didn’t vote, so there are still a lot of [students] out there that we haven’t reached out [to] yet,” Rentschler said. “We will also let the folks who voted for us last week know to vote again because I think a lot of people are very excited.”
Laptops and tablets are no-go during in-person interaction
All three campaigns last week were providing laptops and tablets to students to vote on DuckWeb during in-person interaction. The election board clarified this is not allowed in a memo sent out to all campaigns. According to the election board, voting at tables can increase the possibility that campaigns will vote for students. It can also lead to “intimidation and bribery,” and campaign can be misleading or obstructing” to students.
Campaigns are not allowed to pass out t-shirts
Slates can only give out t-shirts to students after registering them as volunteers for the campaigns. All campaigns must submit all volunteer registration forms by 5 p.m. April 10.
One Oregon also needs to make sure its volunteers and candidates are following the rules, Rentschler said.
Rentschler is the presidential candidate for One Oregon. (Taylor Wilder/Emerald)
“Because this is the first election for a lot of folks [with One Oregon], we need to make sure they stick to the message and know what they are doing campaign-wise,” Rentschler said.
In addition, both campaigns will continue to educate students about their platforms.
“We will push on different aspects on our platform, because we have talked about transportation, Uber and textbooks for the last two weeks, but our platform is much more than that,” Rentschler said.
But getting the word out for One Oregon will be difficult, because the slate is banned from campaigning both on campus and on social media from April 11 to April 14.
Students can vote in the runoff election to decide the next ASUO President and other senate and financial committee candidates on DuckWeb beginning 9 a.m. April 11. Voting closes at 4 p.m. on April 15.
Here’s a timeline of everything that’s happened in the 2016 election so far:
