Elections 2013: Who's Won The Starting Vote?

You may have noticed from the bombardment and overload of your newsfeed that the biggest popularity contest in the University calendar has begun.

Sadly we’ve yet to see any candidates make fools of themselves publicly, as for this week all of the campaigning will be online, but with one candidate rumoured to be planning the Harlem Shake, there is much to look forward too.

Most candidates have got themselves up and running now, with this student created site reporting real-time information on which candidate has the most amount of Facebook likes.

In our recent predictions article, we’ve been polling readers, asking who has won their vote so far. We’ve had over 2,300 votes so far – pretty good considering at the time of writing, manifestos hadn’t even been released.

From the stats it seems that there will be a hot contest in the next few weeks for the place of Union top dog, with a surprise being that David Gilani’s strong competition seems to be Ellis Sims not Peter Ward, as originally thought. Judging by the Facebook likes though, Peter and Gilani are neck and neck. So it seems to be a three man race.

Within 1% of each other, the VP Education candidates seem to be completely splitting the vote, with Dessie just in the lead. Another closely contended role is VP Sports Development, with all 4 candidates currently within a few percent of each other, although Alex Mortlock is just about winning. It will be interesting to see how these candidates decided to separate themselves in the next few weeks in order to win over the currently undecided votes.

Slightly less contested is VP Welfare, with Josie Torrice being the early favourite. It seems that she does face steep competition from Sophie Brewer, who is currently closest on her tail.

SUSU’s next DCI is currently set to be David Martin, who has taken a large early lead. Oli Coles is also storming the VP Communities poll. Similarly Claire Gilbert seems the certain favourite to be the next VP Engagement.

It will be interesting to see how these stats change as more information from the candidates are released. We’ll keep you up-dated with who is set to take control over you union next year.

Left to right: David Gilani, David Martin, Dessie, Claire, Alex, Oli and Josie