On Monday, March 2, the ballot for the election of Senior Class Representative, Financial Affairs Committee (FAC) Chair, and Program Board (PB) Chair opened. The ballot closed on March 3, and the result came out on the afternoon of March 4.

Lucy Westerfield ’15 and Hannah Trostle ’15 won the election for MCSG Senior Class Representative. The turnout was extremely low, having only 67 validated votes out from the entire senior class. Lucy earned 50 votes and Hannah won eight votes.

Daniel Yee ’16 was elected as FAC chair. The FAC is the part of Macalester College Student Government (MCSG) that manages the student activity fee, allocates money to student orgs and helps create a sustainable yearly budget. Yee won 192 votes (50.31 percent) out of 322 votes total, and Jianhong Chen ’18 and Samuel Doten ’16 followed with 106 votes (33.54 percent) and 46 votes (14.29 precent), respectively.

Yee, currently a member of the FAC, said that his experiences working for Macalester First Aid and campus administration have helped him understand the “importance of knowing where the money … comes from and where it is going.” His background as a member of a working class family “taught [him] many things about budgeting and working with fiscal problems.”

Yee wanted to be FAC chair because he “[believes] that student organizations are the heart of Macalester.” He wants to help organizations get the full funding they need in order to sustain their activities. He aims to protect the budgets of cultural orgs, renew “the dialogue on Club Sports,” and ensure that org-sponsored events are “conducted safely and … continued to be funded.”

“I’m excited to see Dan become FAC Chair-elect. He’s a good guy, and I’m sure he will take the FAC in a positive direction,” said Doten. “I look forward to his leadership and initiatives.”

Blaise Yokoyama ’17 was elected as PB chair with 277 votes (92.3 percent) out of 300 votes in total. He wanted to become a chair because he has “always been interested in being involved in a small school like Macalester.” Yokoyama has two years’ experience working with PB.

While FAC had three competing members, Yokoyama was the only candidate who ran for PB.

“I have a lot of ideas about PB next year, and I’m glad I could get the position,” he said.

“Someone might think that the fact that I was the only candidate means no one wanted the position, but that’s not true.” According to Yokoyama, the other potential candidate was unable to apply because of their study abroad program. Also, Yokoyama says he feels responsible because he was the only candidate who could fill the position.

He hopes to promote more collaboration with other organizations, as well as to actively seek feedback from the student body. “Lots of PB events are repeats, just doing the same thing every year,” he said. “We need to be more intentional with programming events.” He thinks it is important to attract students not just with free food, but with the events themselves. He plans to increase the number of surveys to get more feedback from the students and implement their opinions in PB’s programming.