Haddock and Riley Win In Landslide

John S. Haddock ’07 and running-mate Annie R. Riley ’07 were elected president and vice president of the Undergraduate Council (UC) in a landslide this week.

Haddock and Riley received 59 percent of the first-place votes cast, the Election Commission announced earlier tonight. Their ticket received 2,308 votes out of 3,896 cast, while surprise second-place finishers Magnus Grimeland ’07 and Tom D. Hadfield ’08 received 912 votes and John F. Voith ’07 and Tara Gadgil ’07 received 664 votes. Slightly fewer votes were cast this year than the 3,985 cast in last year’s election.

While Voith and Gadgil—as Campus Life Committee chair and Student Activities Committee chair, respectively—were the insider ticket, the team lost momentum after a series of damaging stumbles became public earlier this week. Grimeland, who is in his first semester on the UC, and Hadfield, who has never served on the UC, ran as outsiders.

In an interview earlier tonight, UC Treasurer Matthew R. Greenfield ’08, who worked on the Haddock-Riley campaign, credited the ticket’s strength to being “two great candidates working with a great team.”

Haddock’s election could signal a new direction for the council in planning campus-wide social events, a central issue during the campaign.

Although Haddock originally advocated a student referendum on the council’s role in campus-wide social events, he has argued since the beginning of the campaign that the UC should not have any involvement in campus social programming.

Haddock has also said that he would now support a separate programming board—something that he did not explicitly support at the beginning of his campaign.

Haddock and Riley’s election marks the end of an unusually bitter campaign.

“This race is different than any one I have seen on campus,” said current UC President Matthew J. Glazer ’06 in an interview yesterday. “The dynamics were totally different than years past. This year there was so much potential for a nuanced debate. A lot of unfortunate events that I am sorry that took away from the potential for those nuanced debates to happen.”

—Check thecrimson.com for updates throughout the evening.

—Staff writer Alexander D. Blankfein can be reached at ablankf@fas.harvard.edu.