By By Rob Tokanel, News Staff

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The extended voting period for Student Government Association (SGA) president came to an end Saturday, but the candidates and students are going to have to wait a little longer to find out who won the position.
SGA President Rob Ranley said there are only two members of the organization who have the results, which still need to be confirmed with several school administrators. The vote count and the winner will be announced Wednesday afternoon by Senior Vice President for Enrollment and Student Life Philomena Mantella, and the candidates will find out what happened at the same time as the student body.
‘Last year, they called the candidates as soon as [the results] were confirmed, but this year we decided not to,’ Ranley said. ‘We wanted to make the announcement a bigger deal basically.’
Candidate Ryan Fox said he isn’t surprised he’s going to have to wait and that he’d rather be sure the information he’s hearing is correct. He said he’s been taking the time since elections ended to rest.
‘I’ve been taking the past day to catch up on sleep,’ he said. ‘From all the students I’ve talked to and throughout the campaign, I’m confident in what the results will be.’
Candidate Matt Soleyn, who announced the suspension of his campaign and the endorsement of a no confidence vote for those who did not plan to vote for him Wednesday night at a Resident Student Association (RSA) meeting, said he is still concerned that the vote count may not have reached the required 20 percent necessary to make the election official. Soleyn said he received no notification that the count was met and that he didn’t expect to know if it had been until Wednesday.
Soleyn said as of Friday, he was told the count was only 200 votes short of the required 20 percent. Ranley said official numbers would be released today; he could not say that the threshold had been met until the numbers were formally verified by Information Services.
‘I definitely want to see it met,’ Soleyn said. ‘If it wasn’t for RSA and what happened on Wednesday, I would’ve been actively trying to get that 20 percent.’
Soleyn said the decision to suspend his campaign Wednesday was a choice he made in the moment when RSA turned down his request to move to Executive Session, which would have meant the meeting would be closed to the public. Soleyn was expected to explain his intentions for the presidency and his recent election as Vice President for Housing Services, but he decided not to speak to the issue when the group turned down his request to force non-council members out of the meeting.
‘The RSA General Council put me between a rock and a hard place,’ he said. ‘It was either drop from the election and suspend my campaign or be impeached from RSA. So with that choice, I went with the option of suspending my campaign at the advice of a couple people I was able to consult there.’
Although Soleyn stopped campaigning, he said he is still an active candidate, and votes for him will count. He said he was told he could submit a formal letter of resignation from the candidacy to the Senate Nominations and Elections Committee, but that he never had time to do it because he was sick for several days and then was busy with classes.
However, Soleyn said if he were to win the election, he would most likely take the position.
‘If I were to win, I think that was something that I kind of left open on Wednesday night,’ he said. ‘After putting in a lot of thought, I decided despite a lot of negative press and the fact that I maybe didn’t campaign as much as Ryan Fox, I think if the student body says that they want me to be president that I’m going to serve them as president.’
Former SGA President Joey Fiore said he didn’t see very much advertisement from either candidate, but even with low voter turnout, he is pleased with the direct elections process.
‘Any time you have more people involved in the civic process it’s good, so regardless of whether the numbers this year reach the numbers they were last year, it’s still better than the Senate voting for itself by far,’ he said.