GPSA announces results: delay came from tied race

The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly announced its election results this morning,… The Graduate and Professional Student Assembly announced its election results this morning, after a 48-hour delay due to a tie in one of the races.

The elections committee had to deal with a tie for the vice president of communications position. Kawa Shwaish, chair of the elections committee, said that Michael Lipschultz, a computer science major in the School of Arts & Sciences, and Karina Sepulveda, a Katz Graduate School of Business student, both received 33 percent of the votes cast for the position.

Law school student Nyasha Hungwe won the presidential race with 61 percent of the vote, the largest margin in any of the competitive races — most were decided by 10 percent of the vote or less. Preliminary 450 of the 10,000 graduate students at Pitt cast their vote last week on the my.pitt.edu portal for the next GPSA executive board.

Shwaish said that none of the results of the GPSA elections have ended in a tie in the past few years, and the bylaws of the GPSA do not address this problem.

“It was a challenge,” Shwaish said.

After holding a meeting on Sunday afternoon, the elections committee decided the current tie will be broken at an assembly board meeting on Wednesday, April 13, at 6:15 p.m. in room 548 of the William Pitt Union, Shwaish said in an e-mail to the assembly board, which includes representatives from each of Pitt’s graduate schools.

Both Lipschultz and Sepulveda will be given three minutes for a presentation in front of the assembly board. In the case of a tie in the board’s votes, the current president, Nila Devanath, will cast her vote and break the tie, Shwaish said in the e-mail to the board.

The candidates were e-mailed this morning around 6 a.m. with the results as they stand. Members of the assembly board, a body composed of representatives from each graduate school, were notified shortly after.

The candidates originally thought they would be notified of the results over the weekend. However, the elections committee e-mailed the candidates Friday evening to let them know the committee was delaying the release of the results due to “complications.”

In the e-mail Shwaish sent to the assembly board containing the results of the election, he emphasized the importance of each vote.

“These were very close elections which truly illustrates how every vote counts,” Shwaish said in the e-mail.

President:

Nyasha Hungwe – Law school – 61 percent

Dwyer Arce – Law school – 39 percent

VP of Committees:

David Givens – Arts & Sciences, Religious Studies Dept. – 100 percent

VP of Communications:

Michael Lipschultz – Arts & Sciences, Computer Science Dept. – 33 percent

Karina Sepulveda – Katz Graduate School of Business – 33 percent

Tied

Daniel Taglioli – Law School – 21 percent

Bryan Murray – Law School – 12 percent

VP of Programming:

Samannaaz Khoja – Graduate School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences – 42.8 percent

Katie Moriarty – Arts & Sciences, Dept. of French and Italian – 42.6 percent

Bryan Murray – Law School – 15 percent

VP of Finance:

Anthony Cray – Katz Graduate School of Business – 55 percent

Devi Sharanya Sampath Kumar – Graduate School of Public Health – 45 percent