After the vote on May 13 and 14, 12 students were elected to the United Student Association for the 2009-10 school year at South Seattle Community College.

Nathaniel McRae was the elected president; Eric Owen, vice president; Peter Duncan, issues and concerns chair; Shail Patel, legislative affairs chair; Yifan Chen, marketing chair; Kai Ma, academic success chair; Tzu-en Lin, Jonathan Girmatzion, Mary Shipley, Sochetna Chhay, John Bartels, senators. And I was elected to the community service chair position.

Leading up to the election, on May 11 and 12, the candidates gave their speeches in the school cafeteria. Some of the positions had only one candidate. Nonetheless, Monica Lundberg, the adviser of student government, encouraged all candidates to give a speech.

"This activity provides an opportunity for our student leaders to develop their public speaking skills," Lundberg said. "Like most effective organizing and community building, speaking takes a lot of practice. It's also an important way to engage with the student body, so they know who you are, and to hear what you are doing to represent them".

Lin, one of the elected senators, gave his first public speech at SSCC on May 13. He said he was "nervous," and added: "However, it was a great opportunity and experience for me. I appreciate this chance to talk in front of the students and staff. I'm looking forward to more chances like this in the future."

While it wasn’t the first time students could vote for their student representatives online, it had been a while since the last online voting took place on campus.

Julie Rowe, one of the presidential candidates, said online voting was a good idea to accommodate students who were not on campus while the polling booths were open.

She also pointed out some inadequacy in the online voting. The voters weren’t able to change their selections if they chose a candidate in error.

Further, the design of the Web site made one candidate visible on the top of the page and the other visible only if the voter scrolled down. "In the future, I think it would be best to have both an online option and a polling table," Rowe said.

The election results came out on May 15. McRae won by 12 votes. McRae said he enjoyed the campaign and thought the competition made the campaign more critical and voting more essential.

"I think where I succeeded in the election was in my one-on-one campaigning," he said. "Instead of just spreading my campaign flyers throughout campus and wasting paper, I decided to focus on fully informing everyone I contacted with my future plans with student government."

Some other candidates enjoyed the campaign, too.

"I didn’t have anybody to campaign against," Lin said, "but I still made flyers and passed them out. I found it so interesting, and I made some friends when doing so."

Rowe said she most enjoyed the spirit of teamwork. "So many friends and even people I’d only recently met came forward to volunteer their help with my campaign," she said. "I was overwhelmed with their support. Even after the election, I’m still receiving a lot of support and well wishes."

The new representatives will attend several trainings in preparation for their transition into the next academic school year.