University of Wisconsin student Leland Pan secured a victory in the race for a seat on the Dane County Board of Supervisors Tuesday.

The Dane County Board of Supervisors is in charge of county ordinances, levying taxes and passing laws concerning law enforcement and appropriates money for services. The District 5 seat has typically been held by students in the past.

The April 3 board elections secured a supermajority for Democrats on the board, with 28 of the 37 seats. Supermajorities on the Dane County Board of Supervisors are rare, with Republicans holding the last one nearly 30 years ago, Chair Scott McDonell said in an email to The Badger Herald.

Pan thanked his supporters in the district for supporting him throughout the process. He said he is considered to be relatively young to hold a district seat that is typically occupied by an upperclassman student, but he cited his experiences in local politics as justification.

Pan is involved in both the Associated Students of Madison and the Student Labor Committee, as well as the Madison community as a whole. He serves as representative of the College of Letters and Sciences and has also been involved in numerous local organizations, including the local Tenant Resource Center and Rape Crisis Center.

He was met with significant contention after posting controversial Facebook statuses and speaking out against interim Chancellor David Ward.

According to Pan, the local elections partly illustrate the “continuous backlash” to many of the policies enacted by Gov. Scott Walker.

He added the administration’s enactment of property tax levies and the cutting of social services played a role in the local elections.

“[The people of Dane County] really showed that they want to vote people in who were willing to defend those services, who were willing to stand up to those funding cuts,” Pan said.

McDonell said in the email that after Walker passed the controversial budget repair bill, more Democrats participated in local elections this spring. Republicans voting to cut collective bargaining rights aligned themselves with Walker, McDonell said in the email.

Some districts in Dane County that are typically conservative in their vote, including Deforest, Stoughton and Sun Prairie, elected Democrats to the Board this past election.

The supermajority on the board, according to McDonell, will not change much due to the fact that the Democrats had previously already held a majority of the seats.

McDonell cited that making improvements to the lakes will be less difficult after the recent elections.

UW junior John Magnino, who ran against Pan for the District 5 seat on the board, cited the special circumstances that made the election unpredictable due to its occurrence over spring beak.

“It was a clean race, and maybe if it was during the regular school time, it would have gone differently, but it didn’t, so best of luck to [Pan] in the next two years on the county board,” Magnino said.

He added he has no plans to run for the position in the future.