By Nick Jacques, News Correspondent

Junior Peter Petrin beat middler Chris LaColla by more than a two-to-one margin to become Northeastern’s student body president for the 2012-13 school year, the Student Government Association (SGA) announced Wednesday.

Petrin, a Student Government Association (SGA) senator, received 2,191 votes, 61 percent of the total votes cast. LaColla received 1,063, 29.6 percent of the votes. Another 335 students, 9.4 percent, voted no confidence.

Election Committee Chair Taylor Cotter announced the results in the Senate Chambers last night after a strong push by SGA members to get the 3,270 minimum votes – 20 percent of the student body – required for the election to be valid.

“I can’t think of any better way to serve a community that I care about, like Northeastern, than in a position like this,” Petrin said. “I’m incredibly grateful for all the voters on this campus.”

Senator Nick Naraghi beat current SGA Chief of Staff Terry MacCormack by a much closer margin. Naraghi received 1,748 votes, 48.7 percent, while MacCormack received 1,454 votes, 40.5 percent. And 387 students, 10.8 percent, voted no confidence.

This was the first year that the position of executive vice president was part of the Northeastern direct elections. Petrin and Naraghi ran together, while LaColla and MacCormack ran independently.

“Terry and I went at it neck-and-neck the whole way through and first and foremost I’m just really glad we kept it clean and fair,” Naraghi said. “I still have a good relationship with Terry, which is a good thing to come out of a campaign with.”

Looking forward, Naraghi said he is ready to take on the new responsibility.

“I think that we’re going to do great things next year,” Naraghi said. “All these things we’ve been talking about, now we have the opportunity to implement them. It’s really a privilege.”

Petrin and Naraghi said they look forward to improving relations between SGA and the student body next year.

“We want to get senators out of the student government office and really get them out and about around campus,” Petrin said. “We want to break that perception of the student government as SGA,” and make it individual representatives more visible to students.

Petrin and Naraghi also said they want to keep meeting with students like they did during their campaign.

“The conversations that we started during this campaign don’t end with the end of campaigning,” Petrin said.

“The candidates got their acts together in the last minute,” SGA Elections Chair Taylor Cotter said. “We really plead for the senators to get out and do more.”

Cotter said the 3,270-vote requirement, 20 percent of the student body, was met at 2:45 p.m. Tuesday, less than 10 hours before the midnight deadline. The SGA had already voted to extend the deadline on Thursday when the minimum hadn’t been met. They had to decide on Thursday so Information Services could set up the extension before the weekend. If the requirement was not met at the end of the two-day extension, the election would have been decided by the senate.

SGA had to extend its voting deadline in the 2009 and 2011 elections after falling short of the 20 percent requirement during the initial voting period.

“If you [give people] the opportunity to wait until the last minute, they’ll wait until the last minute,” Cotter said.

Seven hundred and fifteen people voted Tuesday, the most since the first day of voting, March 26, in which students cast 874 votes.

Cotter attributed some of the initial low voter turnout to problems with the online voting software. She said students using Google Chrome were having a difficult time accessing the ballot.

Students cast 3,589 votes over nine days this year. Last year, 3,620 votes were cast over 10 days.

All six referenda questions on the ballot passed. The ballot included a non-binding referendum to recommend freezing tuition, a referendum to equalize the penalty for getting caught with marijuana with the penalty for minors getting caught with alcohol, two referenda to reform resident hall sign-in policies and two referenda to increase environmental sustainability on campus.

Only the environmental referenda, which were proposed by the Husky Environmental Action Team (HEAT), will be addressed immediately, Cotter said. Since these referenda are resolutions they will be sent to the administration for consideration.

The other four referenda are Senses of the Student Body and have no binding power. Cotter said it’s up to the SGA Executive Board to implement them.

“They truly need to have game plans for how they want to implement the referenda,” Cotter said.