Tim Palmer and Nora Chan will lead the class of 2013

Tim Palmer and Nora Chan became the newly minted presidents of the class of 2013 Tuesday night by a margin of 206 votes.

Palmer and Chan edged out Adam Jutha and Sarah Kaminer in the run-off election and said they were excited to begin work for the senior class.

“We just want to thank everyone for all their support,” Chan said.

“It’s been overwhelming, but awesome.”

The runoff was the first senior class president runoff since 2007.

Run-off elections for senior class presidents haven’t been common because usually only two pairs of candidates run, said Shruthi Sundaram, chairwoman of the Board of Elections.

But Palmer and Chan said they actually expected to go into a runoff.

“I mean, I think the fact it was so close demonstrates that there were awesome candidates,” Chan said.

“With three really strong candidates we figured it would come to this.”

Moving forward, they said they have several goals as their classmates’ advocates.

“We’re going to try to get a calendar together for next year, get more student input and get the ball rolling,” Palmer said.

Proposed events include an 80s-themed “Dean Dome Dance” benefiting Dance Marathon, a beach volleyball tournament and cookout and a senior stand-up comedy night.

This year’s race has been notable for the technical glitches in the general election last week, which made some juniors with senior status unable to vote.

Inaccurate student data collected by the registrar for studentlife.unc.edu caused this problem, Sundaram said.

The data collected was based on ConnectCarolina, where students with 90 credit hours are granted senior status unless they manually change it.

Sundaram said the problem was taken care of for the runoff by basing students’ status on the number of completed semesters — five or six — instead of credit hours.

Last week, students who couldn’t vote on the website sent an email to the board with their votes, but for 10 minutes that night the board’s inbox was full.

The board also remedied this technical problem for the runoff by raising its email inbox capacity to 1,000 emails in a period of 24 hours, Sundaram said.

Jutha and Kaminer said the campaign was a fun experience and they are now looking forward to their senior years.

Both sets of candidates expressed a desire to work together in the future.

“We’re excited to work with Tim and Nora,” Jutha said.

“They’re going to be great senior class officers and we have absolutely no doubt that they’re going to do a fantastic job.”

He said that they will still work to contribute to next year’s senior class.

“We’re still committed to making sure that senior year is the best experience for all of us,” Jutha said.

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