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Pratyush Mallick ’25 and Ethan C. Kelly ’25 have been elected as the next president and vice president, respectively, of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, following three days of voting by IOP members.
Mallick and Kelly will begin their year-long terms alongside newly elected treasurer Saba Mehrzad ’25 and communications director Hana O’Looney ’26, the IOP Elections Commission announced Monday morning.
According to the commission, 44 percent of eligible IOP student voters turned out for the election. The commission declined to provide official vote tallies or margins of victory to The Crimson.
Voters rejected an anti-establishment bid led by Theo J. Harper ’25, who campaigned on reforming the IOP and tackling “a mess wallowing in its own bureaucracy.”
Harper launched his bid after resigning from the IOP’s Student Advisory Committee after they failed to adopt an agreement condemning Hamas for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel.
Mallick and Kelly, who ran as a ticket, campaigned on their wealth of experience putting forward a platform dubbed “Ready, Set, Go.” The pair presented a three-step vision: securing funding for student research, building up pre-professional resources, and facilitating political engagement.
Mallick is a Computer Science and Government joint concentrator from Texas. He currently serves as vice president of the IOP and previously served as co-chair of the Harvard Votes Challenge.
Kelly, a Government concentrator, currently serves as IOP communications director. The Maryland native is also the founder and co-chair of the Gender and Sexuality Coalition at the IOP.
Mehrzad, the incoming treasurer, is committed to improving the IOP Director’s Internship program, which has come under fire for inadequate funding and a lack of transparency. She plans to move up the application timeline and offer summer housing to students partnering with colleges in the Washington area.
Emerging from a field of four candidates, O’Looney, a sophomore in Mather, will take the helm of communications at the IOP after a year serving as co-director of membership. She has pledged to make paid public service internships more accessible to students and showcase all IOP programs on social media.
The five-day campaign period saw students’ inboxes flooded with emails as candidates vied for student support. Votes were hard to come by this election cycle after the IOP Election Commission cracked down on requirements for eligible voters, trimming the voter list to just under 700 students.
The IOP Election Commission strictly enforced its pre-existing rule which requires students to attend 50 percent of their program’s meetings to be eligible to vote, though concerns were raised over discrepancies in tracking attendance among the IOP’s 14 student programs.
This week, IOP students will elect leaders for six of its 14 student programs, while the eight remaining leaders will be selected through an application process.
—Staff writer Thomas J. Mete can be reached at thomas.mete@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @thomasjmete.
