President and VP-elects intend to focus on increasing senate efficiency with optimism about their fellow executives.
After voting took place on Tuesday, Feb. 17, and Wednesday, Feb. 18, the results for the 2026 Student Government Association elections were published the following Friday. The presidency was won by Bruce Bigler and the vice presidency by Archit Dash. Secretary and treasurer went to Zac Edwards and Regan McComas, respectively, both of whom ran unopposed. The new senator-elect of the College of Engineering and Computer Science is Ian Incledon, Kiah King has been elected as senator of the Oxley College of Health and Natural Sciences, Makayla Goode is the new senator-elect for the Collins College of Business, Will Gonsior for the Honors College, and the senator-elect for the Kendall College of Arts and Sciences is Jules Yang, the only one to run with opposition.
This year’s election used rank choice voting, which is a system wherein voters were allowed to arrange candidates from favorite to least favorite. At the time of counting, the candidate with the least first-place rankings is eliminated, and the ballots which marked that candidate as the favorite are redistributed to whoever their second choice was. This cycle repeats until the winner and the runner-up are all that remain. In theory, ranked choice voting gives more students a chance for their voices to be heard. However, it should be noted that at no point in this year’s elections did any candidate move up or down in ranking due to these rearrangements.
Bruce Bigler, SGA’s new president-elect, won with 300 first-place rankings and a rank choice final count of 458, beating runner-up Beckham Schell by 45 final votes. Bigler declared that he was “pretty hyped up” with the results. When asked if he had been confident of winning, he responded, “it was like, ‘I feel like I’ve really put everything in. If I don’t win I don’t win,’ but I felt good about my chances.” He did admit that there was “a second towards the end where I was like, ‘oh dang — this might be tighter than I think,’ and it was pretty tight there at the end.”
Bigler’s platform was largely built on bringing the Honors College back to a higher station, increasing the efficiency of SGA and obtaining more funds for student organizations. He is planning to ask Senate to create a cabinet position to act as a liaison between different groups on campus. He is optimistic about making improvements, discussing plans to go above and beyond the usual expectations of his position.
“I really hope that this is my full-time job, that all the time I’m in the office of the [university] president, communicating what needs to be done, what the students are looking for and doing our best to make that happen,” Bigler said. In the past, he explained, the presidency has been more of a resume builder and he aims to change that. He plans to spend his summer calling donors and alumni to raise funds and overall “doing what we need to do to make this thing go.”
President-Elect Bruce Bigler. Photo courtesy of @sgautulsa on Instagram.
Bigler’s optimism is also informed by the understanding that SGA is coming out of a time of adversity. “I think this year was a pretty tough year to be in SGA … It’s really hard for them to take student input into account when the board is pretty much just overhauling the way that we do a lot of things and … cutting programs left and right.” According to Bigler, current SGA president Kadee Jo Ransom has had a “really rough job” keeping student orgs alive amidst the unusual challenges faced this year by SGA with administration’s budget cuts and the lack of direction experienced under an interim university president.
Bigler also believes that the merits of the rest of his executive team will play a key role in bringing SGA and TU student orgs to a new level. Bigler said incoming treasurer Regan McComas has “a lot of great ideas for treasurer.” Treasurer is a role which he says has not been taken very seriously in the past, but that “Regan knows what’s going on all across the Senate, and she is really really committed to this job. Cannot wait to work with her.” Bigler said that secretary-elect Zac Edwards was “a dawg” and “gonna kill it.”
Last but not least is vice president Archit Dash, who Bigler attests to be very efficient and “knows his stuff backwards and forwards” from his three years on the team, and who he expects will be “really good at commanding authority,” and help to shorten the notoriously long senate meetings.
Vice President-Elect Archit Dash. Photo courtesy of @sgautulsa on Instagram.
Archit Dash himself also gave a brief interview to The Collegian on Saturday, Feb. 21. He has been a senator in SGA for three years and chose to run for VP because of how closely the position works with the Senate. “The president — at least from my perspective — is more of an outward facing role, whereas the vice president is in charge of making sure SGA functions properly.”
He agreed with Bigler’s sentiments on the lack of efficiency in our current SGA and said one of his goals was to impose “hard deadlines at reasonable hours” to keep meeting times from taking exorbitantly long, sometimes even going as late as 1:30 am. “That prevents debate from being accessible to a lot of the student body as a whole,” Dash explained. “These are open meetings … but if you’re a commuter, if you’re in a challenging major, it’s kind of rough.” To avoid keeping anyone’s voice from being heard, he is open to twice-weekly meetings which run for less time, as opposed to once a week altogether. “I think efficiency is really valuable in ensuring that we’re actually productive as an organization,” said Dash.
The new VP-elect was also very optimistic about his colleagues on the future executive team. He found Edwards to be “very prepared for that position,” and commended McComas as a hard worker who is certain to “do a phenomenal job.”
Additionally, Dash believes president-elect Bigler “really has the student body’s best interests at heart.” He left off by encouraging students at TU to look into the organization themselves. “I’d say there’s a general feeling of a lack of information amongst the student body in terms of SGA,” Dash explained, in spite of the fact that all of SGA’s minutes are freely accessible on their Sharepoint. “All those meetings are public. If you’re ever bored on, like, a random Thursday night, might as well go see what it is that we do.”
One of President-elect Bruce Bigler’s campaign ads. Graphic by Bruce Bigler
The executive team will take office in early May and serve until May of next year. Until then, the current executive branch will keep running SGA while their successors prepare to take the wheel for the 2026-2027 school year.
