Dartmouth Presidency Runner-Up Refuses To Acknowledge Election Results

In what political scientists are calling “a critical threat to our democratic system” and “kinda a sore loser move,” runner-up for the presidency of Dartmouth College Jonathan Wentzhauser refused to concede the race, calling the Trustees’ decision a “TOTAL sham.”

“This election, if we can even call it that, was completely RIGGED from the beginning, folks,” Wentzhauser yelled at a crowd of roughly a dozen students passing through the Green Wednesday afternoon. “They are trying to steal our VOICE!” he shouted at a group of people with no say in the decision.

Wentzhauser demanded that the election be redone with “verifiable PAPER ballots, not Thayer’s totally CORRUPTED voting machines.” He claimed, without providing evidence, that some votes were altered or destroyed in a wide-ranging conspiracy implicating current College President Phil Hanlon, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, the Vermont legislature, the Wind Ensemble, the women’s squash team, the original cast of Hamilton, and the ghost of Fidel Castro.

All these groups declined to comment except for the squash team, who said they were in a match the night of the alleged fraud, and the ghost of Fidel Castro, who responded to inquiry with a link to the Wikipedia page for the Cuban missile crisis and the 😡emoji.

The Board of Trustees pushed back on the allegations in a sharply worded statement released this week. “Sian Leah Beilock is the totally legitimate president-elect of Dartmouth College: She was duly selected by a vast and diverse electorate of 26 Trustees,” Board chair Liz Lempres ’83 wrote. “Mr. Wentzhauser’s allegations have been disproved by at least four fact-checkers that nobody reads.”

But Wentzhauser maintained that his claims were factual. “I mean, do we really believe she got more votes than me? This is just the coastal elites trying to impose their will on the good people of Dartmouth,” he insisted to a reporter on a phone call from his Cambridge, Mass. home. “Plus, I think I read somewhere that Beilock’s a COMMUNIST. Or a cognitive scientist. Or a Confucian. Definitely one of those.”

Beilock herself could not be reached for comment by press time. Our reporter stopped by her Barnard College office on Thursday, only to find piles of shredded paper scattered around the room.

—KM ’22