Thursday, Sept. 26, Devaughn Henry ’28 won the election for Class of 2028 president, defeating Carsten Chow ’28 and MeSharlia Fountain ’28.
Henry emerged victorious after receiving 349 votes in the second round of ranked choice voting.
“I'm actually really surprised,” Henry said. “I wasn't expecting to win. There was a lot of tough competition. A lot of good, good candidates in the race with me. But, you know, everything worked out in the end, so I'm ready to start helping my class.”
Four seats for the Class of 2028 College of William and Mary Student Assembly Senate were also on the ballot. The winning candidates were Yasmin Kudrati-Plummer ’28, Andrew Kramer ’28, Nina Argel ’28 and Ryan Silien ’28.
In a special election to fill a vacant Class of 2025 senate seat held concurrently, Kyle Lewis-Johnston ’25 narrowly defeated Madeleine Kent ’25 by two votes.
“Honestly, I think I'm very lucky. Madeline Kent was just as good a candidate as I was. I've met with her and got to know her pretty well and what she stood for, and I let her know what I stood for, and she was a worthy opponent,” Lewis-Johnston said.
The winning candidates will be sworn in on Tuesday, Oct. 1.
In ranked choice voting, voters rank multiple candidates in order of preference, instead of casting their vote for one candidate.
If no candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes, then the candidate with the least first-choice votes will be eliminated, and the first-choice votes toward that candidate will be redistributed to the voter’s second choice candidate in a second round.
This process continues until a single candidate receives a majority of votes.
According to the BEEF Act, “RCV [Ranked Choice Voting] encourages candidates to reach beyond their support base, therefore resulting in outcomes that better reflect students’ preferences.”
Looking ahead, Henry touched on what he plans to do in SA.
“I want to learn more about the different committees and the rules and things that our Student Assembly works off of,” Henry said. “Also, I just want to start focusing on things that I can do to help my Class of 2028. Like I mentioned in my campaign, working with them to figure out a day that I could figure out having office hours, start working on those holiday celebration, budget requests and things like that.”
