In a close race won by 152 votes, Bryan Fernandez and Brianna Sanchez were announced tonight as president and vice president, respectively, for USC’s Undergraduate Student Body for the 2024-25 school year.
Fernandez and Sanchez ran on a “C.A.R.E” platform that stood for community, accessibility, representation and equity. Their first plans as president and vice president will be to ensure the accessibility of USG to students.
“... One of the biggest parts is going to be budget allocation,” Sanchez said. “And I think that’s going to be meeting with our newly appointed cabinet, and also ourselves, seeing what we can do to allocate that to the best of our abilities. We want to really focus on student basic needs [and] trying to see how we can incorporate line items and how much discretion we have with allocation.”
The duo also emphasized a focus on reaching out to students and crossing that bridge between the student government versus the student body.
“We look forward to reaching out to as many of you as possible to ensure that USG is more transparent and more worried about USG getting around to students,” Fernandez said.
Until their official appointment in the fall 2024 semester, Fernandez and Sanchez plan to establish their cabinet to get things running in the coming months.
This year, 4,306 students participated in voting during the presidential and senatorial election, which is an increase of 201 votes from last year’s turnout. Of the 4,306 students who voted, 4,099 casted a ballot in the presidential race.
According to USG’s election code, the ticket that receives over 50% of the vote wins the election. With USG’s new ranked-choice voting format, the winning ticket needed 2,050 votes to win. Since none of the tickets won the majority of the votes, the second-choice votes from the ballot with the fewest first choice votes were allocated to the rest of the tickets. The votes were then retallied with the additional votes.
Fernandez and Sanchez won with 1,504 first-choice votes and 596 of the reallocated second-choice votes, a total of 2,100 votes. Sam Stack and Christian Shaw followed in second with 1,564 first-choice votes and 384 second choice votes, a total of 1,948 votes. Julianna Melendez and Klarissa Palacios finished third with 1,031 first-choice votes. Out of the 1,031 ballots casting Melendez and Palacios first, 980 second-choice votes were reallocated; 51 students abstained.
The results of USG’s senatorial race were also announced Tuesday. Since only 11 students ran for the 12 positions, every nominee was granted a seat. The next chief justice and executive cabinet will decide whether a special election will be held for the 12th seat or if the seat will remain vacant.
From ascending vote order, the meeting confirmed that the 2024-25 USG Senate will consist of Heydy Vasquez, Patrick Nguyen, Mikaela Bautista, Diana Carpio, Brandon Tavakoli, Seva Raman, Jackalyn Karamanougian, Dane Sprague, Jeremiah Boisrond, Elija Martice Barnes and Akshay Manglani.