Hunter, Smillie, Gosline win ASUM elections

Trevor Hunter and Siri Smillie won the ASUM elections Thursday night, beating Allie Harrison and Jake Yerger by 274 votes.

“I feel OK I’m excited and really humbled,” Hunter said shortly after getting the news at Sean Kelly’s.  “We want to change ASUM to make sure we’re including everyone, make sure ASUM is transparent and open.”

Alex Gosline won the race for business manager against Jose Diaz by 522 votes. If Diaz had won he would not have been allowed to take office after violating ASUM bylaws due to overspending during the campaign.

The top four new senate members in terms of the votes they received are Miranda Leftridge, Katie Singer, Yan To Cheung and returning member Sean Morrison. They all came within 130 votes of each other.

Incoming president Hunter is a 20-year-old junior majoring in history and political science from Kalispell, and Smillie is a 21-year-old junior majoring in political science from Billings.

They said their first objective once they get into office is transparency, and this is the issue they felt won them the election.

“The biggest difference is we wanted to make ASUM accessible to all students,” Hunter said. “They (Harrison and Yerger) were more advocating for change in ASUM itself, for student groups.”

Hunter and Smillie credited their win to pounding the pavement and talking to student groups and individuals on a daily basis throughout the campaign.

“We worked our asses off,” Hunter said.

Waiting patiently at Finn & Porter restaurant for her phone to ring, Harrison thanked current ASUM president Dustin Leftridge for the news and passed it on to her running mate, Yerger. They took the news well, and congratulated each other on a good race, commenting on how much they learned through the campaigning process.

Harrison and Yerger said it wasn’t any one issue they campaigned on that cost them the election. Hunter and Smillie simply got more people to vote for them, Harrison said.

She said she and Yerger hope to share their ideas with next year’s senate. ASUM is currently disconnected from the students and it’s time to approach the students instead of waiting for them to come to the senate, Harrison said.

“I have a lot of faith for the future of the campus,” she said.

Yerger said he wishes Hunter and Smillie the best of luck and hopes they can follow through on their promises and make UM a better place.

“It just wasn’t meant to be, to use a really bad cliché,” Yerger said.

“I think this year we had a really good senate, there was a lot of consensus,” Leftridge said. “They will really have a chance to follow through with some of the things they started in the fall.”

Advocating student rights and ensuring the sustainability coordinator follows through with the job of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on campus are two of the issues the Hunter and Smillie administration plan to keep plucking away at.

Hunter did not think the blip on Wednesday, which stopped voting on CyberBear for three hours, affected the outcome of the election. 

“The only people that voted between midnight and 8 a.m. was us.  It was us and the senators,” Hunter said.

Elections committee chair Rikki Gregory said that if anything the error helped turnout.  She sent out a campus-wide e-mail notifying students of the error, potentially letting more students know about the election.

The turnout was far less than during last year’s election, but Gregory attributed this to no referendum on the ballot this time around, which only happens every two years. There were approximately 100 more votes than two years ago when the ballot also lacked referenda such as fee increases.

The new ASUM administration is made up of three friends this cycle. Hunter and Smillie celebrated the results of the election at Sean Kelly’s along with the new business manager, Alex Gosline.

Also at Sean Kelly’s, holding a separate rally, was state democratic attorney general candidate Steve Bullock. He picked up the food and drink bill for Hunter and all of his supporters. 

Gosline has big plans for his term as ASUM business manager. He wants to get ASUM out of their current deficit, provide adequate funding for student groups and start a discussion to remove ASUM’s administrative assessment, he said.

The assessment is essentially a tax the administration charges on money ASUM gets through student fees and student group fundraising. This year that assessment totaled about $88,000, Gosline said.

“It’s probably going to be the toughest fight a business manager has put up in a while,” Gosline said.