photo by: Contributed/Apramay Mishra

Grant Daily, left, and Apramay Mishra, right, were elected to the top roles in KU's student government on April 25, 2020. Mishra is student body president, and Daily is vice president.

In perhaps the most unique student election in university history — conducted electronically amid a global pandemic — University of Kansas students voted in a new student body president and vice president over the weekend.

Apramay Mishra, a junior from Lawrence, and Grant Daily, a junior from Wichita, were elected as student body president and vice president, respectively, with nearly 80% of the 2,355 votes cast.

“Nothing really happens on this campus without people who are passionate about it,” Mishra said. “Grant and I are lucky to have a team around us that is just as passionate as we are, and we’ll never take that for granted.”

Mishra and Daily ran as part of the Free Staters coalition, which allowed them to form a group of like-minded senators to run with them on one ticket. Their challengers were Isabella Southwick and William Wilk, who ran independently for the top two roles in the student body.

The 2,355 votes cast represent a roughly 10% voter turnout of the 23,188 students on the Lawrence campus. Mishra and Daily said they were proud of that number, as it surpassed turnout in the 2019 election without having students on campus to actively campaign for their vote.

Though the two won’t be officially sworn in until a meeting on May 20, they now have a month to begin planning how to lead the student body with operations happening remotely for the foreseeable future. It’s still unknown if KU will hold in-person classes in the fall or how the university will function once it’s safe for students and faculty to return.

That said, a global pandemic doesn’t change many of the issues that Mishra and Daily campaigned on with their coalition.

Their three main platforms centered on affordability, inclusiveness and accessibility for KU students. If anything, those problems will only be magnified once campus can resume even somewhat normal operations, the two leaders told the Journal-World.

“Just because there’s a pandemic in our way doesn’t mean we’re going to take any days off,” Daily said. “These problems seem impossible to overcome, but I’m glad we’re going to be able to start working on them. Governing is when we actually get to help people.”

During the campaign, the Free Staters coalition donated funds that normally would have been used to campaign on campus — T-shirts, advertising and the like — back to local businesses in the Lawrence community. They raised and donated nearly $500 through a Venmo campaign launched to give back to businesses, many of which employ KU students.

“It’s all relative, but we were really happy to be able to directly put money back into the community once the pandemic was announced,” Mishra said.

Going forward, Daily said he wants the incoming administration to use its unique position in the student body to lobby more for the issues that directly affect students. Specifically, he said, they will likely focus on how to help students economically, simply because so many are financially worse off now than they were before the pandemic.

“We need more people to have more influence on the systems that affect them,” Daily said. “Students should have their voices heard on things that affect them no matter what.”

Mishra and Daily will replace outgoing President Tiara Floyd and Vice President Seth Wingerter.