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Friday, November 21, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
Initiative loses Senate race
Betsy Bergman, Initiative student body presidential candidate, is consoled by a friend, Chuck Hall, Washington, D.C., senior, Bergman and her running mate, Stephanie Quincy, lost the election, unofficially, by 151 votes.
Cheers wins elections by unofficial count of 151
Members of the Initiative Coalition knew last night that the race would be close, but they refused to give up.
By KAREN SAMELSON
"It's not over till the fat lady sings," Betsy Bergman, the Initiative presidential candidate, and her friends said while waiting for the final results of this week's Student Senate elections.
Bergman kept her composure when the telephone call came at 12:55 a.m today to the Initiative headquarters at the Masters Inn, 2222 W Sixth St. The caller told her that she and her running mate, Stephane Quincy, had lost to Cheers candidates Brady Stanton and Kelly Milligan by an unofficial count of 151 votes.
Bergman and Quincy received 1,542 votes, or 46.8 percent. The appenents received 1,693 votes, or 51.3 percent.
Friends consoled Bergman while she waited for the band, Absolute Ceiling, to finish singing. She was forced to make a formal concession.
"I'm so sorry." Bergman told her supporters. "We ran a really great, clean, responsible, we-know-what's going-on campaign.
"I'm surprised. I think it says a lot for Initiative. It's so close. That's very encouraging."
Bergman praised the candidates and held out hope that they could capture seats in the professional schools. At 2 a.m., only 23 of 64 Senate races had been decided, and Cheers candidates had won 18 of them.
"Of course, I wish Cheers congratulations," she said.
Bergman, one of the student representatives to the Senate Executive Committee, would not comment on whether she and Quincy would appeal the election.
Bergman told reporters that she didn't know what had cost Initiative the election.
She said Cheers' issues were flashy on the surface but weren't as solid as the other.
Cheers' issues appealed to freshmen and sophomores, she said at 11:20 p.m. when she announced that Cheers had carried all 17 Nunemaker seats. Nunemaker senators represent freshmen and sophomores in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
"It's a shock to me. I don't know what happened," Bergman told more than 100 Initiative candidates and supporters.
"Here's the deal. Cheers issues are freshman-sophomore issues," she said. "I don't want you guys to give up."
Laura Rohan, Initiative's campaign coordinator and Toppea senior, said Initiative knew that if it was going to lose seats, it would be Numemaker seats.
Cheers has proposed a program to lobby the Lawrence City Commission to permit students under the legal drinking age to enter bars even if they couldn't drink. That issue attracted Nunemaker students.
The party began on an optimistic note, and if the 56 Initiative candidates were nervous, they tried not to show it.
Quincy and Bergman joined the partners on the dance floor for a while. Bergman and friends spent much of the evening waiting for news in the hotel lobby. Quincy left early in the Hall where votes were beaten counted.
The candidates kept reminding themselves that Cheers had carried the Nunemaker seats by only about 200 votes.
Circumcision and Zippy lose race
Good news came at 12:15 a.m., when the coalition learned that it had won two seats each in the schools of Pharmacy and Social Welfare.
"We could still take this." Bergman told the dwindling crowd.
Spirits were boosted again 20 minutes later when a telephone call from the election headquarters in Naperville had earned a high win both Law School seats.
By NANCY BARRE
The Circumcision Coalition promised yesterday to "trim waste from a male-dominated society."
But that was just a small part of the platform in this surprise write-in campaign in the Student Senate elections this week.
The members of the coalition, who put up more than 400 posters in Wescoe and Marvin hills yesterday and Wednesday, promised students 550 for their votes.
Other campaign promises were to remove noisy squirrels from campus, shorten the winter season with a special green dye and guarantee free parking by laying off 78 parking service employees coming off all parking service vehicles.
The coalition offered fictional candidates Les Small for student body vice president and Jenny Hybe for "professional nurse."
Circumcision Coalition members joined Zippy the pinhead, a cartoon character, as a write-in candidates in the race for student body executive positions.
Both write-in coaltions lost the election to the Cheers coalition, and no official vote count for the fictional candidates was given.
Allan Klenkel, San Antonio, Texas sophomore and vice chairman of the Student Senate Elections Committee, said the committee did not count votes for candidates who weren't enrolled as students. The committee also won't count votes for candidates who didn't meet the election registration deadline, he said.
Neither one of the fictional coalitions met either of the requirements. Klenke
Mike Larkin, Lake Quivira senior, said he had started the Circumcision Coalition to poke fun at Student Senate elections. He always had wanted to start a joke coalition, he said, and he finally did it this year because it would be his last year at KU.
"I looked at some of the real posters and got my ideas from that, then I wrote mine up at about 5 a.m. Tuesday morning." Larkin said. "It was a lot of fun."
He said he had started out with the word "circumcision," then molded the rest of his ideas around that.
"It itens that in past years, a lot of people just picked a sort of violent-sounding word. . . . then built their campaign around that." he said. "We just did the same thing." he said.
Larkin said he and two students who
helped him with the campaign were trying to satiate Student Senate campaigns that didn't have any real issues and that didn't generate much student interest.
"The only people that vote are people that have friends in the coalition," he said.
Charles Munson, Leawood junior, who is running the campaign for Zippy, the star of a syndicated cartoon, he thought the Circumcision campaign was similar to Zippy's campaign.
"It's mostly humorous, but a little bit serious," Munson said. "Whenever you satirize, you're trying to be funny, but you're also criticizing at the same time."
Laura Rohan, Topeka senior who ran for an architecture and urban design seat with the Initiative Coalition, said she liked the joke campaigns.
"I think they're hilarious," she said. "As long as someone has taken interest enough even to put them together, then we're making progress."
Jeff Bedwell, Omaha, Neb., junior, who ran for a seat as an engineering senator with the Cheers coalition, wasn't quite as amused.
Bedwell said that for him, "It was just so ridiculous that it didn't even evoke a response at all."
Voter turnout increases by 70 percent in election
By BILL RAYNOLDS
Staff writer
About 70 percent more students voted in this year's student body elections than in last year's, although the officers they elected will serve shorter than usual terms.
This year, 3,578 students, or 13.9 percent, cast ballots. Last year, only 2,083 students, or 8.4 percent, voted.
In the race for student body president and vice president, the Cheers coalition received 1,693 votes for 51.3 percent of the vote, while the Initiative coalition received 1,542 votes, or 46.8 percent. Write-in candidates received 63 votes, or 1.9 percent of the total vote.
The voter turnout percentage is the highest since fall 1984, when seven coalitions had candidates for the two top offices and 4,206 people, or 17.4 percent, voted.
Stanton and Milligan will serve only until April because of a change the Senate made in the spring. A new election will be in April.
Glenn Shirtliff. Senate Election Committee chairman, attributed the higher voter turnout
"The coaliations deserve credit for putting on good campaigns and letting students know about the issues and the voting process," he
said
Of the ballots cast, 81 were declared invalid, leaving 3.497 valid votes.
Shirtlife said election vote-count protests, if any are filed, must be made by 5 p.m. today, and requests for vote recounts must be received by Monday at 5 p.m.
This year's election was the closest since fall 1983, when the winner won by two votes in a 3,390-vote election. The election was later declared invalid.
This year, computerized paper ballots were used for the first time. Shirtliffe said. Results in the presidential race were announced at about 12:45 a.m. today, almost six hours after polls closed.
"We didn't have any choice," he said, adding that regular voting machines used in state elections earlier this month were impounded under state law and could not be used for 30 days after the state election.
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Shirtlife said the ballots were fed through a counting machine, which then transferred the numbers onto a computer tape.
The tape transferred the numbers to another computer program, which tabulated the contents of each ballot. Shirtliffe said
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THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS
Presented by
Book by:
Larry L. King & Peter Masterson
Music & Lyrics by Carol Hall
Presented by The University of Kansas Theatre and the KU Department of Music & Dance
8:00 p. m. November 14, 15, 21 & 22, 196
8:30 p. m. Sunday, November 16, 1986
7:30 p. m. Thursday, November 20, 1986
fashion-Praeter Theorem Murphy Hall
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This production is an associate entry in the 1987 American College Theatre Festival XVIII and is partially funded by the KU Student Activity Fee
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