LANDSLIDE

Anticipation filled the air last Thursday evening as candidates crowded around the De Anza College Student Body Senate Office to receive the results of the recent elections. Grievances and appeals meetings had delayed the counting of the votes by over week and, although the results were scheduled to be released late Thursday afternoon, candidates had to wait hours longer due to technical difficulties.

During the wait, Robin Claassen, a candidate for VP of administration, was worried about voter fraud, he said, and asked the elections committee and members of his coalition to exercise caution.

Terell Sterling won the presidential election by a large margin, receiving 429 votes to Kurt Pham's 249 and David Hinault's 222.

Kurt Pham said, "I think I lost because my opponent is the imitation of Obama, and if you are running against Obama it is close to impossible to win."

Esha Menon was elected vice president of budget and finance, Calvin Lam vice president of student rights and campus relations and Yujin Yoshimura vice president of administration. June Yuan was elected vice president of marketing and communications, Jimmy Chim vice president of diversity and events and Anna Shevchenko vice president of student services.

The DASB Senate penalized Sterling last week by planning to deduct 10 percent of his vote count for telling Japanese Student Association President Satomi Yokoyama that the club could endorse two candidates running for the same position. He won despite the deduction. In fact, in none of the cases where candidates were penalized for malfeasance by the senate did the vote deduction influence the election outcome.

"I didn't know that they couldn't endorse two candidates but could endorse two coalitions," said Sterling, but outgoing VP of budget and finance Eden Su was not convinced. "Ignorance is not an excuse," she said.

Kurt Pham, who watched JSA president Yokoyama sign two endorsement forms -- one for Sterling and one for himself -- received the same penalty as Sterling for compliance in breaking the election code.

Prior to the discussion of the JSA issue, VP of student rights candidate Andrei Fomenko announced that he was going to present video footage from a previous grievances meeting.

Before the footage was shown, Sterling stormed out of the meeting, saying, "I'm tired. This is the biggest joke ever. All they're doing is making this the joke of the century … [The current senate] represents nothing."

Many senators felt the video footage was one-sided and biased. Alex Lin said, "When we watched the video, there only happened to be little parts. There wasn't Satomi's witness testimony, there wasn't a lot of other testimony - a lot of it was [cut] out. It was only what Terell said and Gregory Knittel's (Japanese Student Association Advisor) testimony. It was incredibly changed … and out of context."

Current Student Trustee Jordan Eldridge voiced concern over what he called illegal bias, conflict of interest, unethical behavior and disregard for parliamentary procedure throughout the election process. He is consulting with administrators to verify the legality of the election.