Jeremy McElroy has been elected the 102nd President of the Alma Mater Society (AMS). But it was a bittersweet victory.

McElroy won the Presidency by more than 1000 votes over 2nd place Michael Moll. This is in contrast to the last two Presidential races, which were decided by around 40 votes.

But the bitterness came with revelations that McElroy had, along with VP External candidate Mitch Wright, been a contributor to the anonymous blog ithinkubc.wordpress.ca, a site aimed at attacking current AMS President Bijan Ahmadian.

Although his actions could be construed as him running in a slate with Wright, with neither of his opponents planning on filing complaints and the Elections Committee stating that he should not be disqualified, McElroy will almost certainly succeed Ahmadian as President.

“I’m feeling great that everyone put so much faith and trust into me, but I’m also feeling terrible that I betrayed that,” said McElroy.

“I said it in my apology and my statement to the elections committee; this is not a sign of things to come. If anything, scandal is out of my system.”

Despite the scandal, McElroy said he is looking forward to working with all of the new executives in the upcoming year.

“Every single person in this race was running for the right reasons,” he said.

According to McElroy, running for President was much more difficult than his campaign for VP External last year.

“It was way harder…[last year] I was on the ground [and] I had a fantastic campaign team,” said McElroy. “We were doing classroom announcements every day, doing flyering every day.”

This January however, he had a much smaller team to work with.

“It was pretty much just me and my word against the Bijan machine, if you will. It was one of the most difficult, emotionally and physically debilitating things that I’ve had to do with my life.”

When asked after his victory what he would say to Ahmadian, who was his most vocal opponent this election, McElroy, after a long pause, praised what he believed to be Ahmadian’s legacy.

“Bijan did a lot of great things this year in terms of repairing the relationship between the AMS and the university. As well, he tried to get the AMS to act and think and perform in a much more professional manner when dealing with all the organizations, so for that I would say thank you.”

Moll, who came 1109 votes behind McElroy, said that although he was disappointed he didn’t win, he felt he ran a good campaign.

“It was a good race, a great learning experience,” said Moll. “I definitely started to engage a lot of students and saw that I had the ability to lead a big group, just not big enough to win the election.”

Of the 1650 votes that McElroy had over ther third place finisher Omar Chaaban, one of them belonged to Chaaban himself.

“I voted for Jeremy,” he said. “I voted for myself second.”

Chaaban said that he genuinely believes that McElroy will make an excellent President.

“When there was the possibility of him being disqualified, I was against that,” he said.

Chaaban said that he plans on staying involved with AMS politics and is considering running for AMS Council.