Jaymie Roybal is the ASUNM president for the 2011-12 school year.
Roybal, who ran on the Now slate, received 883 votes in the Wednesday’s election, 62 more than her opponent, Tim Mousseau, who ran on the New Day slate. The Now slate swept the election, taking all 10 Senate seats and the vice president and president positions.
“My heart has been in this since October. I can’t describe it,” Roybal said. “I’m so excited. I can tell you that the best 12 candidates were elected. I’m so proud of this slate — over 13 semesters of ASUNM experience combined between the 12 of us.”
In total, 1,858 votes were cast, but some undergraduates abstained from voting in the presidential election. Also, 67 percent of students voted “no” on Amendment 2, which gauged support for a more-than-$100 per semester student fee increase toward a recreation center,
Sunny Liu, one of the senators on the Now slate, said he wants to work with New Day slate members to try and incorporate their platforms and ideas into student government.
“I know they will be around, and most of them are actually our friends,” Liu said. “It’s great to know we had a great campaign against each other, but in the end we know that we all, prior to the elections, were really close and were in direct contact with each other on a daily basis.”
About 70 people gathered throughout the SUB to wait for the election results to be counted. The New Day slate candidates sat in the bottom level where the announcement was made. The Now slate candidates and ASUNM President Laz Cardenas waited for the results on the third floor of the SUB.
Roybal did not wait for the election results in the SUB atrium with the other slate.
“We didn’t want anything to go down sour, and she really wanted to be respectful in the sense that she wanted to be away from the situation so that nothing bad would come from it,” Liu said. “As a slate, we decided that if our president doesn’t want to be present at the announcement due to personal issues and emotional issues that we would all follow as one cohesive team.”
Cardenas endorsed the Now slate last week, but Roybal said the ASUNM president’s endorsement doesn’t hold as much weight as the student endorsements.
“Every candidate on our slate had more than 18 endorsements,” she said. “We were up at 5 a.m. We were campaigning before the polls opened, and we were up until the last polls closed.”
ASUNM Vice President Joseph Colbert said he did not endorse either slate because he felt it created an unfair advantage.
“I also think it was wrong that the previous president was out campaigning,” Colbert said. “He’s the face of ASUNM, and he’s out there trying to pull votes for the next person that’s going to come in. I don’t think that’s right. There are no rules against it, but I still think it’s wrong.”
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Adrian Cortinas, who ran unopposed for the Now slate, won the vice president spot with 1,471 votes.
“We came with a tactic to advocate for the team as a whole, and I think that’s why we all won,” Cortinas said. “I’m very humbled.”
Mousseau said he was disappointed by the results, but that he would keep working with students and student organizations to advocate for UNM undergraduates.
“We have done a lot for this campus, and we will keep being leaders on campus and keep giving back to the students,” Mousseau said. “This is one moment in our life, and we are not happy with it, but that’s OK. It’s just a moment. We have a lot more of life ahead of us. We move on.”
Chelsea Erven contributed to this report.
