This year’s STUCO 2018 elections, although a far cry from last year’s cause for a revote, had its fair share of misleading campaigns and questionable new policies.

NEON:  205.005 votes

RED: 181.131 votes

ORANGE: 132.864 votes

Bottle Caps?

The 2018 planillas received votes based on how many bottle caps they brought for charity. While this isn’t buying votes, it is a strange new addition to the election process seeing as how many bottle caps a planilla brings has nothing to do with how they will handle being the school government.

The polls

Running week was a bit different this year; 11th grader Eugenio Garza conducted three different polls after each group’s campaigning day. Completed by an average of 120 students (25 percent of the actual pool of voters), the surveys gave an inaccurate representation of where the popular vote was standing. RED was winning in every single one, at times by more than 50 percent. But as we now know, NEON won the elections.

Breaking the rules

There was more than one occurrence where at least one planilla did not stick to the guidelines. The RED team presented proposals that had not been approved by administration. The ORANGE distributed food before school, which was not permitted. NEON made a video with their school utopia that was mistaken for real proposals (cancelling ChEd, selling Tostitos in the cafeteria, etc.).

No landslide

The votes were fairly equally distributed into the three planillas, unlike most years. NEON won with 39.5% of the votes, RED got 34.9%, and ORANGE got 25.6%, meaning NEON beat RED by only 24 votes. The difference between the polls and actual results could be explained by the fact that many 8th graders, which were a minority in the surveys, voted for NEON.

Auditorium presentations

Election day is crucial to one’s campaign; people can be swayed to vote for another party depending on presentation, video, and speech. RED’s nervous speech, far fetched proposals, and NEON’s very alluring vision of ASFM, may have inclined some voters to change their minds. ORANGE, some might say, lost the election because of the vice president streak, prompting many voters to opt for change.