ETSU Student Government Association election results were verified and released on April 8, with Mason Mosier outpacing his competitor Nicholas Jordan by 24 votes in the race for SGA President.
Mosier ran on a platform of lowering barriers between the SGA and student body, as well as a number of other internal reforms.
“One of the things that we stressed the most during this campaign is an end to elitism,” Mosier told the East Tennessean. “This is going to be an SGA that focuses on every single last student and every single last student organization. We’re going to have direct task forces, like a town hall style thing, where that people can come directly to me, where they can come directly to our executives and our senate, and say ‘we want to see this’ or ‘we don’t want to see this, why are you doing this?’ and we’re going to find common ground. We’re going to find things that we can all agree on and go from there.”
Throughout the campaign season, students have raised questions about Mosier’s connections to outside, partisan political groups after the candidate was given a total of $1000 in campaign donations by the Washington County GOP. While no stipulations for the donation were directly mentioned, according to the Johnson City Press the party chairman expressed his excitement that Mosier’s campaign was part of “fighting Liberalism at ETSU.”
“One person that made that comment, we have proven time and time again in our campaign that we are fighting for all the students,” said Mosier. “And this isn’t partisan at all, this is something that we’re going to just increase the quality of life for all of our students. What’s best for ETSU is not left and it’s not right. It is ETSU.”
After anonymous texts were received by members of the ETSU community on April 7 claiming to be part of Mosier’s campaign with promises that he would “stop the kneeling,” Mosier responded on social media denouncing the statement and stating that he agreed with the students’ and players’ right to free speech.
“When we have somebody sending messages out like that claiming to be a representative of our campaign, it’s just really sad,” Mosier said. “And I hope that none of our students were involved with it and that nobody from the other side would want to cause harm to our ticket because I appreciate the other side, I appreciate their campaign. We don’t know any details about it, I know that there’s some investigations and stuff like that still ongoing, but we’re going to get to the bottom of it. I think that we’ll be very happy with the transparency that comes out of it, but we’re going to move forward even when we find out who, what individual or what organization if it came from anybody from ETSU. But we’re going to unify.”
The remaining members of the MEP ticket won their respective races as well, with Ethan Becker elected as Executive Vice President and Paulina Ramierez elected as Vice President for Finance and Administration.
Alongside the executive elections, a number of student senators were voted for first terms and reelection.
Election winners in the College of Arts and Sciences were Emily Brown, Tessa Cavender, Savanna Edwards, Samuel Garcia, Nathaniel Keaton, Lindsey Lung and Murphy McMillan. College of Business and Technology election winners included Thomas Brown, Ethan Eggleston, Micheal Nicholson and Joseph Porter.
In the Clemmer College, Katelyn Hanshew, Styles Martin and Blake Wright won. The election winner in the College of Clinical and Rehabilitative Health Sciences was Gabriella Lehmkuhle, and the College of Nursing election winner was Ruby Bickerton. The College of Public Health election winners were Mehroo Imran and Aarsh Patel.
Undeclared winners were Andrew Herman and Holly Johnson.
