KSU elects new student body president, vice president

Penny told The Mercury Thursday this win took about 10 months of work, but they are happy to have it done.

“There have been a lot of ups and downs … but it’s been worth it, and we’re excited about what’s to come,” he said.

The duo’s platforms included “Empowering You to Give,” “Empowering You to Unite,” and “Empowering You to Own.”

Empowering You to Give includes setting up a program to forgive parking tickets with contributions to Cats’ Cupboard, the university’s food pantry, and a second program to donate unused K-State Housing and Dining meal swipes to peers in need.

Empowering You to Unite is the campaign’s desire to add cultural competency training in the university and bringing more programming in the same vein as KSUnite, which is an university intiative to promote diversity.

Empower You to Own includes changing GPA requirements for some scholarships from 3.5 to 3.0, extending the business building’s hours, adding a help desk in the K-State Student Union, and changing the alcohol and sexual assault training all students are required to go through each year.

Karamali said they are looking forward to building their Cabinet before the April swearing-in so they can being implementing changes quickly.

“We’re not letting people down, because transparency and accountability have been at the forefront since we started,” he said. “When our term ends next April, we want students to be in a better place than they are now.”

Penny and Karamali received 100 percent of the votes because they ran unopposed. Penny said they did not take it as a chance to just coast through the election.

“After the other candidate was disqualified, we knew we wanted to follow through with our campaign,” he said. “We wanted to use that leverage to reach more students to see how we could better serve. So yes, we were unopposed and maybe that took off some stress, it didn’t lessen our drive.”

Last week, their primary competition, Ryan Kelly and Anna Spencer, were disqualified from running because of multiple campaign violations. Kelly, junior in communications studies from Overland Park, and his running mate Spencer, junior in nutritional science of Wichita, accumulated five campaign violations in the two weeks before the election.

Most of the violations had to do with not including the value of donated services on campaign finance reports.

During the student election season, the Penny-Karamali campaign was found guilty of illegally using a group chat to promote the campaign and illegal use of a K-State trademark.