The results for the 10th Chairperson and Deputy Chairperson of the Student Union Election finally emerged last Thursday. The only two running mates, Li Ru-Cheng, a sophomore of Department of Transportation Management and Lin Yi-zheng, also a sophomore of French Department won decisively with 4730 votes and became both the Chairperson and Vice Chairperson without any real challenges. The votes they won are the highest in the history of Student Union. The other record-breaking event was the establishment of on-line crosschecking which was considered efficient and convenient.

According to the Student Union Charter, candidates must win 15 per cent of the votes from the total number of students on campus, which are about 4000 ballots. In the past, the highest record was 3500 for one pair of candidates. This year, as there had been only one pair of running mates, the results were highly unpredictable. However, the final result turned out to be comforting as it went beyond the threshold level needed to be elected. The total count of votes was 5316 with 586 invalid votes. The voting rate reached a height of 19.3%, which was also the best in the history. Most of the votes came from the College of Engineering (1878).

Li and Lin thanked all their supporters and promised to set up proper communication channels between students and the Union. They will ensure the optimization of mass media and an E-bulletin board for communicating with their constituents. Furthermore, they will also improve on the information flow as well as opinion exchange between the university and the students.

The high rate of valid votes was, according to the Union, due to utilizing of on-line database on students’ record to minimize invalid votes, and, in contrast to what had been done so far which was having individual ballot for each college, this year it was possible to vote anywhere where there was a ballot. The locations for these ballots were carefully selected to be proximate to large numbers of students, so that voters could vote easily.

As for the Election of the 13th Student Congress, the results came out last Thursday, too. 11 seats were filled. Unfortunately, 3 candidates from the Colleges of Business and Management did not get elected due to receiving less than the needed 60 votes. There were in total 1229 votes cast, but 51 of them were invalid.

Chen Li-Zi, a sophomore from the Department of Aerospace Engineering won the most votes (186) followed by Zhen Hsin-han, a freshman from Russian Department (116) and Cheng Bo-chun (83), a sophomore from the Applied Physics Department. There was one exception, though. Cheng Yong-hsian, a sophomore from the Applied Physics won with 55 votes, which is below the required 60 votes as his seat was guaranteed by the congress.

Most elected members are veterans in public services so they all promised to work hard on advancing students’ interests in the best way they can.