Victors announced after close race comes to end
Peter McChesney is the new ASUSU president after beating Staci Meacham in the final elections by 377 votes.
Most of the races were a clear decision between the two candidates. However, Sonny Bryant’s 20-vote victory over MJ Tran for diversity and organizations vice president was the closest of the ASUSU elections with 2,578.
This was one of four races in which the person trailing after primaries won the final elections. The other races were programming vice president where Jake Cook beat Tyler Neal, business senator where Edward Norton beat Joseph Ure and engineering senator where Spencer Tell Naser beat Paul Wilson.
In a speech before the new ASUSU officers were announced on Wednesday, current president Noah Riley gave advice to the candidates.
“Whether you’re elected or not is kind of insignificant as to the impact you can have in the university,” he said, encouraging the runners-up to stay involved in USU activities. “I’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of Aggies – past, present and future – and there are a lot of successful Aggies and a lot of those successful Aggies have run for offices.”
In his acceptance speech, McChesney quoted Noah Riley’s speech from last year. McChesney said, “There are many opportunities to get involved at Utah State. With extracurricular activities comes a learning that doesn’t happen in the classroom.”
McChesney said he was excited to be president and promised to work hard and devote the next year to the students who elected him.
The election winners celebrated with their campaign supporters and then went to a meeting with next year’s ASUSU officers.
Nick West, the new HASS senator, said, “The only thing I am truly promising is I’ll work hard and I’ll do everything I can to keep the integrity of my office intact.” West said he is trying to get student evaluations of professors posted online and to unify the College of HASS by getting all of the majors involved.
After the elections were over, McChesney said he believes he can fulfill his campaign goals of better work study and more scholarships because before elections he took his plan to administrators and asked them what would work. He said they gave him input, and he then presented the revised plan to students in his campaign.
He said he would like to incorporate some of Meacham’s platform goals into the presidency, such as her initiative work with ASUSU to get better signs identifying buildings on campus.
“I think this is a great thing because I’ve worked around USU before, such as at the engineering building, and there’s so many engineering buildings you don’t know which one to go to,” he said.
He said they had a common goal of making the campus more inclusive, and his experience as an international student will help him with that. McChesney said he will focus more on the minority groups around campus to give everyone a voice.
McChesney said his work as HASS senator has prepared him for president because it is the largest college on campus with a wide range of majors, and it gave him a good knowledge of campus and a lot of faculty connections.
He said he wasn’t originally planning on running for president last year, but when he began thinking about what he wanted to do to stay involved at USU, he had a dream one night that he was running for president.
“That dream really stayed with me,” he said. And with the thought of running for president in his mind, he joined the seven other candidates to try and become next year’s ASUSU president.
Ultimately he said he wants students to recognize how powerful ASUSU can be in reaching student goals and wants to involve more students next year.
-dilewis@cc.usu.edu