Just when he thought he was out, they pulled him back in.

With two write-in votes, former Student Association President Omar Woodard won a seat in the SA Senate last week. But don’t expect him to take office.

Woodard, a first-year graduate student in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences and presidential administrative fellow, said he does not plan on taking the seat because he has “a whole lot of other things going on.” Graduate seats in the Senate can typically be won with just a few votes. Woodard said he did not vote for himself.

“If you classify someone as winning who didn’t even run for the seat, then, yeah, I guess I won,” Woodard said.

“I just don’t think it’s the right thing for me right now,” Woodard added.

Before becoming SA president in 2004-2005, Woodard served in the SA Senate, and was chair of the body’s Rules Committee. As SA president Woodard worked to improve housing on campus by running the Residence Hall Renewal project in which he successfully urged the University to spend more than a million dollars on renovations to dormitories.

“Even when you’re SA president and in the Senate, you don’t get everything you want accomplished,” Woodard said. “There are other issues I want to address.”

Woodard said that on top of his time constraints and busy workload as a graduate student, he would be reluctant to take a seat in a slate-dominated Senate. In last week’s election, the Real GW slate won 15 of the 21 seats it was vying for; the other two slates combined to win seven seats.

“In my first year in the Senate I was one of only two senators not on a slate,” Woodard said. “The president was not a member of that slate and it made it difficult.”

-Brandon Butler