While many students on campus recovered from Little 500 qualifications, IU Student Association election front-runner, Empower IU’s Dan Niersbach, a junior, sat in his room in Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house.
To his left sat seniors Yumiko Siewenie and Will McElhaney. Siewenie, Niersbach’s girlfriend, is the current speaker of IUSA Congress and served as chief of internal affairs for the Empower IU ticket. McElhaney helped the ticket craft policy but did not run for office.
Niersbach said many on his campaign are hesitant to celebrate the election outcome. The night the results were released, staff from his ticket and that of second-place Focus went out together, but after finding out the intentions of other tickets to file complaints, Empower got to work filing its own.
He said many, him included, on his ticket did not have a chance to celebrate the qualification rounds. His house placed fifth in the starting grid of the Little 500.
“We didn’t really want to file any, but we felt like we had to to protect ourselves because we knew other people were after us,” Niersbach said.
He admitted some of the twelve complaints filed by his ticket may seem petty, but wanted to extend equal treatment to each campaign. Of the 25 complaints filed with the Election Commission, 16 were accepted for further review.
Of those 16 complaints, 12 were filed by Empower. Five of Empower’s complaints were filed against Engage, four were filed against Focus, two were filed against IGNITE and one was filed against Psych Up.
“We filed one complaint that could be applied to multiple tickets, so then we thought it would be disrespectful to him not to treat him as another ticket and a serious contender,” Siewenie said of IGNITE’s presidential candidate, Will McKinney.
McKinney, sophomore, opted to not comment on the status of complaints or results of the election, and neither Engage nor Psych Up responded at the time of publication.
Of the other four complaints accepted by the commission, three were filed by Focus, two against Empower and one against Engage. Engage filed six complaints, but all but one, complaint 19, were initially dismissed because they were submitted as Word documents, not the required PDF format.
Niersbach said on election night he spoke with junior Brandon Sakbun, presidential candidate for the Focus ticket. He and Siewenie both said Sakbun and his campaign have been very cooperative.
Niersbach said the complaints filed by Focus against his ticket which pertained to campaign expenditures were fair game, since complaint 2’s factual basis lay in complaint 1. The order in question was cancelled, but since the expenditure was listed on the intermediary and not the final financial statement, he said they were expected at least one ticket to point it out.
Sakbun, also in SigEp, said as is custom the two candidates spoke about the results of the election after they were released. Despite his sadness at coming in second in preliminary vote counts, he said he was happy for Niersbach and his ticket and glad to call him a friend. He complimented his opponent’s work ethic and mindset, but said what disheartened him most about the election was the low voter turnout.
He attributed the 5,762 votes, almost 700 less than last year’s 6,448, to poor marketing by the Election Commission, which he hopes will be resolved next year. Sakbun said some people he spoke with told him they didn’t vote because of previous years’ elections being decided by Election Commission rulings and the IUSA Supreme Court.
Sakbun said his ticket was confident about some complaints holding weight in the coming days, but he didn’t want to comment on specific complaints until the commission releases its results. While he said the election may not be all the may not be finished pending commission decisions, he was congratulatory of Empower and reaffirmed his commitment to public service.
“The best way to get over losing an election like this is to immediately get back to making Indiana University a better place,” Sakbun said.
