Neon-colored flyers with beaming first-year faces and catchy campaign slogans obscured every door in Anderson. Flashy brochures littered the tables in Jewett’s dining hall. First-years were bombarded with the by-products of this year’s ASWC election. Nevertheless, less than half of the first-year class voted last Wednesday.

Chris Fleming, Allison Ikeda, John Loranger, Ryan Lum, Michael Scigliano, Logan Skirm, Trillium Swanson, Drew Trogstad-Isaacson and Joel Wilson contended for the four Senate positions reserved for first-year students. The winners were Loranger, Lum, Scigliano and Swanson. Results were announced late Wednesday by e-mail.

The new senators will help ASWC decide how to spend the nearly $400,000 granted this year to the organization. That money will go towards the clubs, activities, speakers and concerts that are a staple of college life at Whitman.

Joel Wilson, one of the first-year candidates, said he decided to run because ASWC provides students with “a forum to make change,” unlike his high school student government. “I’m doing it to see if I do actually have a voice in what goes on in the world here.”

“ASWC really does affect you, and it really should be important to you,” said John Loranger, one of this year’s first-year senators.

However, only 205 students, out of a class of 428, chose to vote.

“We have so much going on that voting gets put on the back-burner,” said first-year Emily Allen. “A lot of people feel kind of disconnected from the student government.”

Loranger said he thought that the election turnout was reminiscent of the national participation in elections: “Not that high,” he said, “except for the people who are really interested and who really care.”

Many first-years said they felt that they did not know the candidates well enough to vote. However, those who read the candidates’ platforms online or attended the two forums held in Jewett and Anderson said that doing so was worthwhile.

Gabby Brandt, a first-year who lives in Anderson, walked all the way to Jewett to hear the candidates speak in the First-Year Senate Candidate Forum.

“I went because I heard it was only a 15-minute thing, and I figured I could spend 15 minutes listening to these people talk,” she says. “I’m really glad I went. I think it’s important to be informed.”

Allen said the forum radically affected her decision about whom to vote for. “I really voted based on their personalities and my instinct after watching them speak [in the Jewett forum]. I got a different vibe from each of them. It’s all about the vibes.”

When asked what she thought of the candidates, Allen said, “I prefer the ones who actually seem like they care. Not the ones who want to try to get us chocolate soft-serve in the dining hall.”

Brandt, however, said she really doesn’t care about the outcome of the election.
“I think [all of the candidates] would be good,” she said. “A lot of their platforms were similar.”

First-year Jeff Sterritt was one of the many who did not vote.

“[Voting] just didn’t seem that important,” he said. “It didn’t seem like my vote would make that big of a difference in [an election] that’s not that important in the first place, and besides, I’d have to go a little bit out of my way to do it.”