Smith Wins Student Body President, Routes Govea with Sizable Victory

The author is an opinion journalist and cannot guarantee objectivity in his reporting. Please read critically! 

Landry Smith has won the race for student body president, according to The Student Government Association (SGA) at UT-Tyler who announced the results Thursday.

Smith routed opponent Adan Govea with 555 votes to 172 votes. The election turnout was 737 students, above average in comparison to past spring elections.

“With great gratitude and humility, I am happy to announce that I will be your Student Government President for 2022-2023!” Smith wrote on his Instagram page Thursday.

“I want to say thank you to everyone who voted in the SGA elections and helped me throughout this whole process. I couldn’t have done it without y’all’s (sic) constant support and encouragement and I am eternally grateful for you all,” he wrote.

The Candidates

The current SGA Vice-President, Smith ran on what he called breaking barriers between student groups, fostering a new legacy of tradition and advocacy for improvements in parking, advising and food services.

Govea is the current Senator for The Soules College of Business and ran with focuses on what he called communications, transparency, tradition and justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, or "JEDI".

Smith wrote on Instagram, “I want to say a special thank you to @iamadangovea [Adan Govea] for all that he has done for this great institution and all that is to come.”

Greek Life

Smith appeared to win with sizable support from the Greek community as his Instagram page showed multiple speaking engagements with Greek organizations and many Greek member supporters.

Student Representation

Among the student constituencies who participated in the election, The College of Arts & Sciences had the largest student representation with 180 votes, followed closely by the School of Nursing with 178 votes. The College of Business had the third largest contribution with 162 votes.

Overall, there were 757 votes in this election, mostly from senior classmen (238) and junior classmen (201). Only 60 freshmen voted in the election.

Despite the UT-Tyler’s broad student body that spans Houston, Longview and Palestine campuses, all votes were from the Tyler Campus except for 27 votes from Houston and only two from Palestine. 

The full election results are available on SGA’s website.

Smith full post-election comments are on his Instagram here. 

**A previous version of this article erroneously identified Smith as a Greek. 

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Twitter: @jhescock12

Feature Image via Flickr

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