Stand Up! has retained the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU) presidency with candidate Molly Willmott projected to claim victory after numbers from Farrago/Daniel Beratis confirmed that the margin has extended to over seven per cent. The result comes after a closely contested battle with More!’s candidate, Callum Simpson, who had hoped to bring the ticket back to power after being in the political wilderness for a year after experiencing a large swing against the party  in 2017’s election.

With voting still underway, Willmott and Stand up! have received so far 1311 (46.74 per cent) votes compared to Simpson who trails behind with 1098 amount of votes (39.14 per cenr).

Whilst preferences are yet to be distributed, More!’s campaign headquarters conceded at approximately 10:12pm.

“It doesn’t look good for us, it looks like we might have lost the presidency” said Mark Yin, More!’s candidate for the People of Colour alongside Farah Khairat.

However, it seems More! is defiant in the rest of the contests for the union.

“I just wanted to say I am still in the fight,” said Elinor Mills, More!’s candidate for general secretary and outgoing queer officer.

Meanwhile, other candidates received a total of over 14 per cent of the votes with independent candidate Zhiyu Zhao receiving approximately 8 per cent.

Counts for office bearer, students’ council and committee have not began with those results set to trickle in over the weekend and at the latest, the middle of the coming week. A quick look at the organised stacks of ballots in the voting room sees contests such as welfare looking to be very close.

You can keep updated on the results on Farrago and its rolling coverage here.

This post is being updated as results are being slowly counted.