Nathaniel Dare, Residence Halls Association speaker of Congress, and Alexia Donovan won the 2018 RHA presidential election as president and vice president, respectively.

Dare and Donovan ran unopposed under the slate “Dare Donovan.”

“I’ve dedicated nearly two years of my time and service to RHA, and I’m so excited to be at the helm for this next academic year,” Donovan said in an email.

Donovan said that their main goals are to provide free feminine hygiene products in the residence halls, use RHA finances to provide every hall with entertainment such as gaming systems and ping pong tables and develop a residential life app as a one-stop resource for all of residents’ needs.

Current RHA President Maggie Recca said that the current RHA executives want to push for the continuance of projects put into place during her term.

“I think it’s common to think that with a new year, everything starts over,” Recca said. “But no, there are a lot of great things that you can keep doing and a lot of things that you can put your own spin on.”

One project that the Dare/Donovan platform plans to continue is to make dorm life desirable for upperclassmen.

“We want [to] continue the push to bring upperclassmen back to live in the residence halls,” Donovan said in an email. “We will continue to work with Residential Life to come up with more perks to living on campus.”

While the election process does slightly change depending on the year, Recca said that it remains pretty similar. Candidates have to obtain student signatures in order to be eligible to run. After that, candidates run campaigns and participate in a debate before the voting dates.

Because there was only one slate this year, campaigning was slightly different. Recca said that the slate was less inclined to campaign heavily due to the lack of competition.

“This year, [the campaign] wasn’t that large …” Recca said. “[The candidates] got the word out there, but it wasn’t as public. My year, a lot of people knew about the RHA election, and we had a lot of people vote and a lot of conversation going around each slate.”

The debate also acted as more of a forum where residents could ask questions.

This year’s election saw a significant decline in votes. RHA Chief Justice Noah McCarty said the decline is due to the lack of heavy campaigning by the slate.

“Our total vote count this year was 66 residents: 57 in support of the Slate and 9 in a vote of no confidence,” McCarty said. “This is opposed to last year’s [approximately] 600 total vote count, which came from a competitive and highly publicized election.”

Over the next month, Dare and Donovan will be shadowing Recca and other RHA executives to learn their roles.Recca said that even after the transition period, she will be encouraging the new executives to contact her.

“I won’t be involved next year because I’ll be doing my own thing, but they’ll still definitely be able to reach me,” Recca said. “We are really emphasizing that constant communication and also giving them all the information that we can.”

_Edited by Morgan Smith | mosmith@themaneater.com_