On Friday, May 17, students became active members of Colonel Parker’s embryonic democracy by filling out their Student Government ballot whether they were in the voting booths in search of new student leaders or just an “I Voted” sticker. After a second round of blockaded hallways and ballots the following Monday, the student body had fully elected its Cabinet members and committee heads.

After a runoff race between juniors Natalie Daskal and Matthew Turk, Turk now presides over an elected Cabinet of six as President. “After seeing two presidents, being president is a really hard job,” said sophomore and newly-elected Director of Committee Affairs Carter Wagner. “What I want to do is be able to support the President as much as possible. That’s going to be my primary goal on Cabinet.”

Wagner won his race alongside sophomore Grayson Schementi, who will be next year’s Treasurer. The other four elected members are sophomores Grace Conrad, Alex Schapiro, and Daniel Mansueto and freshman Owen Dudney, who will serve as next year’s Senate Heads. Besides Turk and Schmenti, all other elected officials will be first-time Cabinet members.

As the first sophomore to serve as a Senate Head in recent memory, Dudney attributes part of his group’s success to their lack of Cabinet experience. The group opposing Dudney included two Cabinet members, the incumbent Student Voice Editor and Parliamentarian. Dudney acknowledges that not having held a position in the system, like the majority of the student body, makes your promises easier to sell.

“Based on what I’ve seen, Cabinet this year was just okay,” Dudney said. “It wasn’t exceptional or anything but it did a good job at what it had to do. It’s easy for people who have been in no way involved in the system before to make these extravagant claims that they can reshape Cabinet, that they can blow it out of the water.”

“It helped enormously that I was the only freshman running for a Cabinet position,” Dudney said. “We got, and I got, to my extent, the support of pretty much the entire freshman class, I honestly don’t think we would have won if that hadn’t happened.”

Student Government’s new Faculty Advisor and Upper School history teacher, Susan Elliott, agreed that lack of experience can be energizing for the student body. “Parker’s idea that we are an embryonic democracy is the idea that you want to get as many people involved as possible,” Elliot said. “The idea that people who had no experience wanted to get involved is just a really great indication that the school has got a really positive atmosphere.”

Wagner, on the other hand, thinks that candidates don’t need Cabinet experience, but prior participation and passion should be a factor in who’s elected. “It doesn’t mean you can’t be involved in Student Government if you’ve never done so before, but I think Student Government works really well when you have people who are passionate,” Wagner said. “I think the student body sees through people who show up at Senate at the last minute just to show that they’re involved when everybody knows that they aren’t.”

Though Wagner has never held a position on Cabinet, he still respects those like his opponent who have and thinks this respect led to a clean campaign. “That general foundation that a lot of Parker kids have with each other allowed for a race that was much more focused on the positives of ourselves than the negatives of the others,” Wagner said.

Dudney had a similarly positive campaign experience. But for different reasons. “Most candidates are caught up in this bubble of hyper-positive feedback,” Dudney said. “Because the only people who say things to you are people who are saying positive things, it’s easy to think that you are definitely, definitely going to win.”

As this year’s Cabinet passes the gavel, they do so with two major internal proposals under their belt. Under President and senior Annette Njei, the Cabinet passed proposals limiting the number of committee heads by committee and barring eighth grade from running for committees. “This year was super good because we had Annette,” Elliott said. “Annette was such an amazing leader. She’s so good at it that it was very little work for me because she did such heavy lifting in terms of the student body and organizing things.”

Wagner is looking forward to following in the footsteps of his predecessor, DCA and senior Chad White. “What I really want to compliment Chad on is his ability to follow-up and follow through, his ability to make committee heads feel supported by explaining what’s in their rights,” Wagner said. As he prepares for next year, he’s working to coordinate with Scheementi on how to make committee’s access to the budget clear to them. Additionally, he aims to use the summer to search through the constitution and identify bylaws in need of updating and thinking about committee merger protocol.

Elliot is turning her focus to procedural matters and is hoping to explore electronic and ranked voting, where students would rank candidates 1-3 and the number of times a candidate was chosen second would count for them and eliminate a runoff. “I think it’s maybe the future of democracy,” Elliot said. “I think it would be really neat for us to do that research and have that debate and think about the consequences of that.”