In the first round of balloting, Fighting Hawks garnered the most votes, followed by Roughriders, Nodaks, North Stars and Sundogs.
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The vote was held through Qualtrics, an external survey technology provider, which will tally the votes and look for duplicates before releasing the results to UND next week.
Originally, a runoff vote was planned between the top two nicknames if none of them reached 50 percent, but university President Robert Kelley changed the rule to include the third-place finisher because the second and third choices finished within 116 votes.
The entire pool of eligible voters will have a chance to choose among the top three nicknames in a final vote.
UND is picking a new name after retiring the Fighting Sioux moniker in 2012. Instructions will be released by UND in the future if this vote is necessary to determine the final choice.
“The victor will be the next athletic nickname for the University of North Dakota”, she said.
UND sent out an email this week containing the link students must use to vote in the upcoming nickname vote. “We’re tied into campus right now and a lot are participating”.
“We all just want a fair vote and we want to see our wishes fulfilled”, he said.
“It’s interesting”, he said.
When a committee gathered public nickname suggestions from the public throughout the month of April, Fighting Hawks was submitted twice.
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UND legal counsel said in July Roughriders would be one of the most hard names to trademark because it’s used athletically across the country. “This is the largest response UND has ever received for an institution-wide online poll”. “From what I’ve heard, it’s all over the map in terms of what people like”. “People assume there were 82,000 people who had an interest in voting but I don’t think that’s necessarily true”.
