On Thursday, Brandeis students voted to fill four vacant Student Union seats: Vice President, Rosenthal Quad Senator, Ziv Quad Senator and Midyear Senator. This election was the first round of two in the winter 2015 election cycle.

Charlotte Franco ’15 was elected Vice President. Franco was previously the Student Union Secretary, and served as Student Union Vice President during the 2013-14 academic year. Franco won the Vice Presidency with 373 votes, totaling half of the votes cast.

“The role of VP allows me to be a mentor to all of the senators,” Franco said in an email to the Justice. “As a senior, and a four term member of the Student Union, it is important to me that the next generation of the Student Union is well trained. I am hoping that in this role I will be able to help the senate with their initiatives and pass on my experience to them.”

Citing such examples as her “#selfies4secretary” campaign, Franco also noted that her prior experience in campaigning helped her during this election cycle.

“I think that the best way to campaign is through your own network of friends and supporters,” she said. “I always have online presence with a Facebook group or event. For my first VP campaign I even had a full website that people could look at with all of my ideas.”

Franco said she wants to use her position as Vice President to make a lasting positive impact on the Senate.

“I really want to use this time to mentor the Senate and pass on my experience,” she said. “I want to help them with all of their initiatives especially regarding clubs and club structure.”

Additionally, Emil Koenig ’18 was elected Midyear Senator with 50% of the votes cast. Koenig said in an interview with the Justice that his election wasn’t something he planned, but he is looking forward to the opportunity.

“My friends decided it would be funny to put my name into the ‘other’ candidate [box] and I had never done anything like [student body government] before but … the more I thought about it, the more I thought ‘this could actually be kind of fun,’” Koenig said.

Koenig also credits his friends’ energy and loyalty with his successful campaigning.

“It was the people who were campaigning for me [who helped me win]—they had a lot of enthusiasm, a lot of energy and a lot of time,” he said. “They put in a lot of effort into making sure everyone knew about me running, even though I wasn’t on the ballot.”

Yet while he became involved with the Student Union by accident, he is looking forward to helping fellow midyear students acclimate to life at the University.

“It started out as a joke, but now that I’m here, I do want to take it seriously and see what I can do with the Student Union,” Koenig said. “I got elected by the midyears ... so I think first and foremost I want to see what’s going on and make sure [the other midyears] are informed about what’s happening.”

The positions of Ziv Quad Senator and Rosenthal Quad Senator were not filled this election cycle, with voter abstention signaling a need for new candidates in the Ziv Quad election, and ballot error rendering the Rosenthal Quad Senator election invalid.

According to Student Union President Sneha Walia ’15, the Rosenthal Quad Senator ballot unintentionally did not list one of the candidates, which invalidated the election results. Walia said in an email to the Justice that both candidates were notified of the error, and the position will be up for election once more in the second round of voting later this week.

In the second cycle of winter 2015 elections, students will vote to fill the positions of Student Union Secretary, in addition to the Ziv Quad and Rosenthal Quad Senator positions.