Rob Hardin / Chief Photographer / rh124104@ohiou.edu

AAA Student Senate presidential candidate Michael Adeyanju (center) celebrates with Sally Neidhard, AAA vice-presidential candidate, and family friend Tony Sallar (left) last night following the announcement that Adeyanju had won the presidential election and Neidhard the vice-president’s position.

Third-year senior Michael Adeyanju of the Ability and Accountability (AAA) party will replace Tim Vonville as next year’s Ohio University Student Senate president.

With 1,088 votes, Adeyanju beat junior Will Klatt of The Birthday Party by 41 votes. Last year, Klatt lost to Vonville by 17 votes while running as an independent.

“It was disappointing, but the struggle for student power on campus and the end of the corporate university model has just begun,” Klatt said.

AAA took 21 of the 34 positions in the senate, sweeping all five off-campus commissioner jobs and taking four of five positions each as senator-at-large and Student Activities Commission at-large. The Birthday Party won 12 positions overall, including third-year senior Maleka Anderson as treasurer.

Freshman Evan Webb of the Action through Communication and Teamwork party (ACT OU) was his party’s only winner as senator for the Russ College of Engineering and Technology.

Although all three parties will be represented on next year’s senate, Adeyanju stressed the importance of coming together as one group.

“At the end of the day, students all share one common goal — that’s enhancing the student experience,” Adeyanju said.

ACT OU’s presidential candidate, third-year senior Mashur Rahman, said he plans to get involved in the senate despite last night’s outcome.

“This is by no means the last of Mash on this campus,” he said.

About 2,700 students voted in the election, significantly less than the approximate 4,600 who voted last year. The senate Board of Elections chairman Micah Mitchell attributed the decline in participation to the lack of ballot issues in this year’s election.

Last year, students could vote their level of confidence in OU President Roderick McDavis’ ability to lead OU, how much his administration sought out and respected students’ opinions and how well the administration made OU’s financial information available. Seventy-eight percent of the voters said they had no confidence in McDavis.

Although the original election day was May 15, problems with the online ballot suspended voting until yesterday in Bromley and Voigt Halls and Scott Quadrangle. About 100 of the 2,700 votes came from yesterday’s voting in these dorms, which possibly affected the outcome of the election, Mitchell said.

Chief Information Officer Brice Bible attributed the problem to incomplete testing of the online voting system the day before the scheduled election. He said that, though it was a “shared responsibility,” the senate and Board of Elections is mostly in charge of conducting the tests.

Mitchell said the board did find some problems with the system while testing but notified the Office of Information Technology and thought the office had resolved the system’s glitches before the election day.

Bible said OIT will try to create a more detailed procedure for testing the system by the end of the school year.

Senate President Vonville, who worked with Mitchell, said they conducted all the trial runs correctly.

“Board of Elections members were not trained in IT,” Vonville said. “They didn’t develop the site. It really wasn’t in their capacity to change issues.”

Mitchell said the move to an online ballot has been a learning experience and it would take time to “fix all the kinks.”

 “You pull on a thread and another comes loose,” he said.

— Anne Elliott contributed to this article.