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The Paly Voice

The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

The Student News Site of Palo Alto High School

The Paly Voice

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Sophomore wins student government presidency

After tallying the ballots from last week’s election, the student council announced winners sophomore Mohammed Abid as its second semester ASB (All Student Body) President and junior Kolby Dauler as its new ASB Vice President.

According to Abid’s pre-election statement, his goals include “further uniting students,” holding “events that the students want” and distinguishing Paly as “the best high school out there.”

“I want to give back to this school what it gave to me,” Abid stated. “If I am elected president, no student’s opinion will go unheard and it will be very easy to communicate with student government.”

Dauler’s main objective is to “make the Lunchtime Activities something that Paly students regularly attend and look forward to,” according to his statement.

“I have realized that Paly often lacks student involvement in school activities,” Dauler stated. “I want Paly students to know that I am very approachable and open to advice.”

The online polls also named the following frontrunners: junior Matt Severson for ASB Secretary, Dan Griffin for Senior Class President, Ilene Rafii for Junior Class President, Alexis Medina for Sophomore Class President and Melanie Maemura for Freshman Class President.

Students, equipped with their ASB cards for identification purposes, had the opportunity to participate in the election during an allotted three day period. The student council reported that a total of 425 students cast their votes at lunch between Wednesday and Friday in the quad.

Despite the relatively minimal turnout, student council didn’t appear to be disappointed or regretful, officials said. Rather, the initiation of this latest voting system sparked their optimism.

“This was the first time we had people vote on their own,” currently presiding ASB President Anique Drumright said. “New things take time to get used to. People will naturally be confused the first time around.”

As ASB President for the first semester, Drumright acquired the position of “Elections Chairman” and was therefore delegated the responsibility of overseeing the winter elections.

“We should have known about the system we were going to use ahead of time,” Drumright said. “That way we could have made the directions clearer. I hope there are more clear guidelines for the spring elections. ”

Drumright, along with the rest of the council, decided that conducting the elections on campus was better than the alternative online elections. The original intent of that idea was to allow voting to be optional.

“[Forcing people to vote is] not right,” Drumright said. “Voting should stem from a person’s own initiative.”

With the initial implementation of the online election, many questions arose in reaction to the launch of the proposed online system. Student council members expressed concern in regards to the issue of voter apathy, worrying that the new system would cause a low voter turnout, which is exactly what happened.

With only 365 online voters, student council officers considered the results less than satisfactory and chose not to disclose these results to the public, according to Drumright.

“The electronic elections were deemed inaccessible to the majority of Paly students by the student body president,” said student activities director Joann Vaars in an email interview with The Paly Voice.

“They [online elections] were not accessible to all Paly students,” Drumright said. “That’s wrong and unfair. We [student council] were publicizing the elections at the library, but the server was apparently down and people were unable to vote.”

Another major apprehension that had surfaced was related to fraud. According to The Paly Voice’s webmaster Patrick Horn, who programmed the electronic election, potential glitches in the system could have permitted hackers to tamper with the election results.

“Someone with remote FTP or shell access to the Shadow server may have been able to obtain the password required to access the election database, if they had been devoted to it,” Horn said. “I personally think it was easier for students to stuff physical ballots in past elections by sticking extra papers in the pile.”

“Luckily, we didn’t have any fraud problems,” Drumright said. “That would have complicated things a lot.”

Now that the council has dealt with the issue of elections, it is looking forward to what the new semester will bring.

“New blood on the cabinet means new energy,” said Drumright, who will step down from office at the end of the semester. “I’m positive that second semester will entail good leadership.”

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