Voting booths lined New Quincy lobby yesterday. MIT alum Matt S. DeBergalis mounted an ultimately unsuccessful Council challenge, running on a student-friendly platform aimed at bringing undergrads to the polls.

Although an upstart MIT graduate who pledged to provide a student voice in local politics gave them a run for their money, all nine incumbents stood poised for reelection to the Cambridge City Council late last night, according to unofficial results.

Preliminary results also showed Cambridge voters electing two challengers to the School Committee and voting down a measure that would request that the state allow rent control to be reinstated in Cambridge (see related stories, pages 6 and 7).

Most of the election results were unsurprising: in an uncontroversial race, the incumbents reclaimed their seats, and perennial favorite Anthony D. Galluccio—nicknamed “The Gooch”—once again dominated the election, winning more votes than any other incumbents.

Twenty-six year old MIT graduate Matt S. DeBergalis’ strong showing was the surprise of the evening, eliciting gasps from the veteran political observers who gathered in the Cambridge Senior Center to watch “The Count” last night.

DeBergalis registered approximately 700 to 1,000 students on the Harvard and MIT campuses during his campaign and garnered 1,172 so-called “number one” votes, giving him more than the total number of first place votes received by incumbents E. Denise Simmons and David P. Maher.

But DeBergalis was not elected under the city’s unusual system of proportional representation, in which each voter ranks candidates and each rank on the ballot matters—the number one votes count most, but the other slots on the ballot count too.

As the top vote-getters achieve “quota”—one-tenth of the total votes cast—the rest of the votes in their piles are transferred to the next candidate on each ballot.

The process, now done almost instantaneously by computer, continues in subsequent rounds until nine council candidates make quota and are elected—in last night’s preliminary count, for 13 rounds.

And while DeBergalis created a base of voters who strongly supported him, he lacked the citywide name recognition that would have put him over the top.

After the count of number one votes was announced, DeBergalis’ campaign manager Geoff Schmidt said he thought his candidate would do well, but was nervous that his candidate might not receive many transfer votes because his campaign strategy focused on recruiting new student voters to place him at the top of their ballots.

“We ran a very different campaign,” Schmidt said. “The number of number ones we need for a seat may be a lot different [than for other candidates].... The worry is that everyone who voted for Matt put him number one.”

He added that he thought DeBergalis had been “accepted into the Cambridge political community” and that his appeal was not limited to students.

DeBergalis’s campaign focused on student issues such as increasing the number of eateries and transportation options available late at night.

“One of the big problems nationally and locally is that young people don’t vote,” DeBergalis said. “A lot of good things will happen with a student voice on the council.”

After learning of the results after the transfer votes, DeBergalis said he planned to continue his involvement in politics.