Priscilla Mensah will be this year's CUSU PresidentStudents of Cambridge

Election results have just come in for this year's CUSU elections.

After a long night of counting, with the result announced almost an hour after it was originally scheduled to be released, it was revealed that CUSU President for the year 2015-16 will be Priscilla Mensah.

Though early indications in the evening indicated a very tight race, Mensah won the online vote, with the final combined total of online and paper results giving her 2077 votes to Milo Edwards' 1520.

4,005 ballots were cast, a significant improvement on last year's result.

In a recent interview with Varsity, Mensah summarised her candidacy by stating: "If CUSU is not materially impacting the student experience for the better, through new and insightful ways to deal with intercollegiate and departmental concerns, the problem of disengagement will persist."

Mensah ran on a platform of 'Rights and Rents', 'Academic Fairness', 'Stress Free Finance' and 'Wellbeing and Care'. 

Leo Kellaway, another candidate for President, promised "a proper Student Union building", while Katie Akers stressed "re-engagement with CUSU to create a truly effective student union".

Milo Edwards, who came in 557 votes behind Mensah, was at first branded the election's "joke candidate". However, in a blog post shortly after his candidacy was announced, Edwards outlined the 'serious' reasons he decided to run for the position of CUSU President, which included improving the intermitting process, holding a referendum on the issue of a reading week and campaigning for Wednesday afternoons to be made free for sporting activity.

Controversy with regards to Edwards' campaign surfaced when an anonymous blog post called attention to his comedy set at an event in aid of Cambridge Rape Crisis centre in Sidney Sussex College, where he apparently opened saying “Thousands of men have been marching in support of women protesting domestic violence. Well, if you can’t beat them, join them.”

In a statement on his blog, however, Edwards said that the joke was "intended simply as wordplay", and argued that ignorance was a sufficient excuse since, he claimed, he would never have made the joke had he known that the charity supported by that evening's smoker was the Cambridge Rape Centre.

The first result announced at the CUSU counting was for the position of Ethical Affairs Officer, at around 22:20, with the sole candidate Tiantian Chen elected with 2,377 votes, a mere 77 more than the minimum requirement. As Varsity has explained, had no candidate been successfully elected, the position would be 'co-opted' to a decision of CUSU Council under a Single Transferable Vote system, effectively meaning that students would have no direct say in the choice of Officer if the first election failed to return a successful candidate.

That was followed by the result for student representative of the University Council, with Cornelius Roemer, the sole candidate, winning 1,785 votes, with 516 ballots cast to re-open nominations.

The position of Education Officer was then announced shortly after 11pm, with sole candidate Robert Cashman taking 2,006 votes to RON's 601.

Poppy Logan was then announced as Welfare Officer, seeing off a particularly well coordinated RON campaign to win 1,930 votes to RON's 869.

Amber Rose Cowburn, founder of the Invictus Trust charity set up for her late brother, campaigned to re-open the nominations for the position so she could stand in the second election, after attempts to defer her graduate city job with an international banking giant meant that she missed the original nominations deadline. Her campaign was forced underground by CUSU, however, whose statutes ban campaigning for an election before the campaigning period officially starts.

Results for CUSU Coordinator were announced just before midnight, with incumbent Jemma Stewart clinching a narrow victory of 1,164 votes to Ivan Tchernev's 1,092 in the second round, after RON votes prevented Stewart from reaching the required threshold in the first.

Tchernev and Stewart's manifestos were accidentally used as the front and back cover of CUSU's first batch of over 10,000 manifesto booklets, after a printing error led to them being printed inside out

Results for Access and Funding followed 50 minutes later, with Helena Blair re-elected in a third round landslide, winning 1,507 votes to her nearest challenger Melanie Etherton's 834. 

Very tight early rounds ensured that the results for Women's Officer were released late in the evening, with Charlotte Chorley and Daisy Hughes edging Amy Reddington out of the race. Only 5 RON votes were cast in the first round, though Chorley emerged as the winner, with a comfortable victory of 878 votes to Hughes' 659 in the third round.

However, the closest result of the evening was for Graduate Union President, with Eric Lybeck winning 291-287 in the final round of voting against Kate Crowhurst, in an election that demonstrated the power of the paper vote: of the 42 paper votes that made it through to the final round, only 1 went to Crowhurst.

Results for NUS Delegates have yet to be announced.

@tag_freeman