Junior Roddy Garcia was elected Student Missionary Union president early Saturday morning after a runoff election. He carried 63 percent of the vote, while junior Weston Hancock received 37 percent.
“I’m with a small group of people that I love who prayerfully helped this entire time; we’re just freaking out right now together. We’ll see what happens next, I’m really excited,” Garcia said.
Despite his loss, Hancock said he was doing well.
“I’m sitting around with some of my close friends, just talking about what’s next and just trying to process through what to do with the vision I feel like God has given me, and how to move forward with that,” he said.
After 1,525 votes were cast in general elections, the field of four candidates was narrowed down to the top two candidates. Today’s runoff election was hosted on the same website, but only ran from noon to midnight.
The runoff results reflect the votes from Wednesday and Thursday, which were released today. Garcia originally received 29 percent of the earlier votes, while Hancock received 25 percent.
Senior Amy Howard, AS and SMU office manager, explained that the 885 total runoff votes were a good amount, given the circumstances.
“[The voting table] was only open for one-fourth of the time as it was the last two days,” Howard said.
After last night’s one-vote AS presidential victory for junior Evan Tan and sophomore Becky Gallacher, the SMU election was a much quicker process: results were released minutes after voting closed.
AS has set plans to allow for runoff voting to start immediately after the typical election results are in next year, Howard said.
Anna Frost, Katie Nelson and Elizabeth Sallie contributed reporting
