Estes wrote that by Tuesday night, the race was “monumentally close.” On Wednesday night, Estes continued that rhetoric, indicating in an internal email to candidates that the election was “incredibly close.”

In the subsequent hours, candidates scrambled to attract voters, sending mass emails and messages to students, at times times questioning whether the election could be a four-way tie.

At one point, Estes wrote, the difference in first place votes between Nasrollahzadeh-Goyal and Yang-Jackson was just eight votes.

“[I am] obviously disappointed. It was a really close race, which means a lot of people stood behind the values and the platform that we stand for,” Yang said, later congratulating the winning ticket.

Kanuparthy and Horvath appeared relieved at the closure of the election.

“It was a lot nastier than I was expecting. I didn’t like the sneakiness. I think it kind of turns you into a different person. I didn’t like the way I was thinking when I was on the campaign trail to be honest,” Horvath said.

“This campaign is about how much the other tickets have worked. They really deserved it. They worked incredibly hard,” Kanuparthy said of Nasrollahzadeh and Goyal.

“I think that the other tickets ran incredible races—they definitely won the race,” Turban said. Prompted on why his ticket lost, he added, “I'm not going to say Luke's hairband. But Luke's hairband.”

All three referendum questions also passed, although by varying amounts.

Ninety-two percent of voters supported making Q-Guide difficulty ratings public to students, and 57 percent supported capping discussion and lab sections at 12 students. Fifty-four percent voted in favor of introducing public nap spaces for students.

Because 49.8 percent of eligible voters cast ballots, the Council will not automatically adopt as its official stance the results of the three questions. Still, the Council had already through legislation endorsed the section size gap and reintroducing of Q-Guide difficulty scores.

—Contributing writers Melanie Y. Fu ’18, Samuel E. Liu ’18, Andrés M. López-Garrido ’18, and Daphne C. Thompson ’18 contributed to the reporting of this article.

—Staff writer Noah J. Delwiche can be reached at noah.delwiche@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @ndelwiche.