Robbie Zimbroff ’12 and William Wagstaff ’12, two co-term students, won the race for ASSU Executive with 87 percent of the vote, announced elections commissioner Adam Adler ’13 at a Saturday evening elections results party at the CoHo.
Zimbroff will serve as the President and Wagstaff as Vice President for the 2012-2013 school year.
Zimbroff-Wagstaff beat out incumbent Vice President Stewart MacGregor-Dennis ’13 and Druthi Ghanta ’14, along with Open Source Candidates, the annual Chaparral humor magazine joke slate.
After the Open Source Candidates slate was eliminated from the race with only 289 votes, MacGregor-Dennis & Druthi fell with only 466 votes. Zimbroff-Wagstaff won with 2,998 votes, earning 87 percent of the total vote for Executive.
“Hopefully this wasn’t about two people, it was about a lot more people who have shared ideas and want to continue to build on a shared vision for the coming year,” Zimbroff said after the results were announced.
The win for Zimbroff-Wagstaff came just days after a firestorm of controversy hit the MacGregor-Dennis & Druthi campaign. On Wednesday, a number of campus publications, including The Daily, as well as several students on Facebook broke the story that MacGregor-Dennis had been paying, among other things, for a social media manager to improve his Internet presence, leading to fake Twitter and Facebook followers.
MacGregor-Dennis, Ghanta and current ASSU Exec Michael Cruz ’12 responded to the controversy through a variety of mediums. MacGregor-Dennis never addressed charges that he had paid someone to scrape student email address from Mygroups.
“This was one of the most brutal and painful experiences of my life and I am hugely grateful for everyone who sent me personal messages of support and everyone who spoke out when things crossed the line,” MacGregor-Dennis said after the results were announced. “But mostly what I care about is Stanford being a better place. I wish the absolute best of luck to Robbie and Will and I will be doing whatever I can to support them.”
MacGregor-Dennis said he hopes to still make an impact on Stanford with his remaining year at the University, citing his pride in his “ability to bounce back.”
“This was an incredibly hard time for me personally,” he added. “I think I will learn a huge amount from the experience.”
Zimbroff and Wagstaff benefitted from numerous, wide-ranging campus endorsements, including SOCC, FLIP, QueerCo, JSA, The Stanford Review and The Editorial Board of The Stanford Daily.
The election saw a decrease in voter turnout, possibly attributed to student apathy regarding the ASSU, or the lack of a hot-button issue, such as last year’s ROTC referendum. Adler said this was also due to the MacGregor-Dennis controversy and subsequent emails.
“We’ve known we’ve been up to that challenge since we got into this,” Zimbroff said in response to the news that voter turnout was the lowest in at least five years. Zimbroff added that his goal will be to see a significant increase in voter turnout by this time next year
“I think it’s sad,” Zimbroff said about the anonymous, campus-wide email attacking MacGregor-Dennis and the events leading up to the election. “You wouldn’t want this to happen to you or any of your friends.”
“It got too big for what the ASSU is,” Wagstaff added about the controversy. Both newly elected candidates said they personally reached out to MacGregor-Dennis before results were announced.
“All we can do at this point is serve the student body as faithfully as we can,” Zimbroff said of the shadow looming over the election.
As for plans now that they have been elected, Wagstaff said the pair will take a quick respite following the hectic campaign.
“Get some sleep. Do some homework,” he said of his plans for the coming week.