The historic trend of SGA executives winning the presidency repeated itself again this year as First Party candidate Andrew Friedson defeated outsider Jahantab Siddiqui of the Action Party by a landslide of 849 votes yesterday.

Friedson won by the largest margin of any presidential candidate since 2002, when Impact Party candidate Brandon Defren took office with a difference of more than 1,000 votes.

“It makes me feel like the student body has confidence in me to lead them,” Friedson said. “The more support I have, the better.”

The number of students voting dipped slightly from last year, with about 20 percent of the undergraduate population turning out in comparison to 22 percent of all undergraduates in 2006.

Friedson won the office with 2,664 votes, while Siddiqui received 1,815. Independent candidate Saam Bozorgmehr received 335.

For the second year in a row, a single party won all of the Student Government Association’s executive seats. Friedson’s cabinet executive board consists of four First Party members: Senior Vice President Brad Docherty, Vice President of Financial Affairs Maria Rescigno and Vice President of Academic Affairs Ade Izevbigie.

The First party also won 18 of the 32 legislature seats, while Action took 13.

“It’s really overwhelming, but I feel like our work was justified by the results,” Docherty said. “We have a mandate to implement our [ideas].”

Friedson said the amount of support from voters was encouraging, and he attributes his success to his campaign’s ability to appeal to various communities, including freshmen and Jewish and Greek student groups.

But Friedson said he couldn’t take all the credit for his party’s “resounding success.”

“I only got so many of the votes myself,” Friedson said. “A lot of the votes were generated by other people on the ticket.”

Among the issues he plans to address are the housing shortage and safety concerns.

“With everything that happened at Virginia Tech, we need to reduce the risk of that happening here as much as we possibly can to make sure that we are protecting everyone at the university,” Friedson said.

Though Friedson’s position won’t take effect for a few more weeks, he said he will work to ensure that there is a smooth transition from current SGA President Emma Simson’s administration to his own.

Simson congratulated Friedson yesterday, but emphasized that her term is “not over yet.”

“I still have a lot of things that I need to do first,” Simson said, adding that she plans to stay in close communication with Friedson next year. “I want to make sure that what I started continues.”

Friedson said he plans to continue much of Simson’s programming, including the Crab Fest, Collegiate Scholarship Reading Program and Student Faculty Dinner. He hopes to improve interaction with students and to foster better communication.

“The biggest thing that I harped on all throughout the campaign that I really meant was reaching out to students and being a lot more transparent and filling in students a lot more,” Friedson said. “I want to make sure that we do that, and we will.”

Upon news of his loss for the second year in a row, Siddiqui shook supporters’ hands in an expressionless daze and accepted sympathy from close friends. He has yet to decide whether he will continue to be active in campus leadership as a senior next year.

“I’m disappointed that we lost; I’m not disappointed that we ran,” Siddiqui said.

The underdog candidate, Bozorgmehr, accepted the news with more optimism, saying that his campaign as an independent candidate may give others hope to run without a party in future SGA elections.

“We want the character of the candidate to stand out more than the color of their shirt,” Bozorgmehr said.

Bozorgmehr called the campaign ride “a blast” and expressed relief that it was finally over.

“In the end I think the right person won,” he said.

Though Bret Cullinan, SGA election board chair, called the campaigning this year “pretty uneventful,” there were at least two bumps in the road.

Siddiqui was fined $585.60 for breaking an SGA rule that prevents campaigning until a week before the election. The Diamondback had mistakenly printed Siddiqui’s comments in an article about the shortened campaign period, which their elections committee considered illegal campaigning.

A few days later, Andrew Friedson’s comments about his platform were published in the monthly campus Jewish newspaper The Mitzpeh, apparently due to a misunderstanding between Friedson and the editors about the newspaper’s publication date. Though the article appeared before the approved campaigning period, Friedson was not fined.

After the results came in yesterday, however, student leaders were ready to start fresh.

“It’s no longer a party,” Docherty said. “We’re going to work together as an SGA. We’re really a team now.”

Referendums pass

In addition to the new offices, students also voted to pass both ballot referendums. The referendum proposing a $12 increase in student fees to convert the campus to entirely clean energy use passed by 3,803 votes.

The students’ vote is symbolic, but if the university should choose to enact it, the money would be used to purchase students’ energy from renewable sources.

The referendum for the Maryland Public Interest Research Group to continue receiving student funding got the nod from 2,385 voters, as well. More than 1,000 voted against it.

Graduate Student Government Elections

GSG President Laura Moore was re-elected to serve an additional term next year after running unopposed in elections held last week.

Moore says her main priorities next year will be continuing an ongoing fight for collective bargaining rights for graduate employees that would allow graduate research and teaching assistants to unionize, as well as getting the Graduate Student Government more involved in Annapolis.

Contact reporters Christina Cobb and Nathan Cohen and at cohendbk@gmail.com.