GRAND FORKS – And then there were three.

Fighting Hawks, Roughriders and Nodaks will be up for a second vote as the University of North Dakota's future athletic nickname.

Results of a five-day public vote released Sunday show 31 percent of voters chose Fighting Hawks over Nodaks, Sundogs, Roughriders and North Stars.

Roughriders came in second place with 21 percent of votes and Nodaks received 20 percent, so UND announced it would also be included in the runoff vote which was originally only supposed to include two.

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UND spokesman Peter Johnson said UND President Robert Kelley made the decision to include Nodaks in the vote because of the small margin between it and the second place name-116 votes.

“I don’t think he had any particular motivation in wanting to include that name,” Johnson told the Herald on Sunday evening. “He just thought it was a slim margin so it deserved a chance to be on the final ballot.”

UND has been playing simply as UND or North Dakota after retiring the Fighting Sioux name in late 2012 in the face of threatened NCAA sanctions. The new nickname will replace the Sioux and UND/North Dakota identities for its athletic teams.

Eligible voters will again select their choice among the three finalists for UND’s new nickname in a runoff vote beginning at noon Nov. 2. Voting will conclude at 11:59 p.m. Nov. 6. The name receiving the most votes will be the university’s new nickname, even if it doesn’t garner a majority of the votes.

Previously, the voting guidelines for the first vote stated any name must receive more than 50 percent of the vote to be determined the university’s new nickname, and that otherwise a runoff vote would be held to allow eligible voters to choose between the two top vote-getters.

That changed when Roughriders and Nodaks differed by only 116 votes.

“We appreciate the participation and input of the voters, and are pleased that we have moved forward to three final choices,” Kelley said in a news release. “We look forward to completing the last important step of this process through the runoff vote.”

The runoff will be similar to the first vote in that it takes place solely online through the survey company Qualtrics and the same stakeholder groups will be eligible to vote: current students, UND employees, alumni, donors, retirees and season ticket holders.

UND Vice President for University and Public Affairs Susan Walton said voters will receive an email containing a link to vote beginning early the morning of Nov. 2, a decision she said was made so people wouldn’t misplace or lose the message.

But this time, the winner will simply be the name that receives the most votes and doesn’t require more than 50 percent as this first round of voting did.

“The winner will be the next athletic nickname for the University of North Dakota,” she said.

‘Not really surprised’

UND Student Body President Matt Kopp said he’s glad three options will be included in the final vote and the one students appear to prefer, Fighting Hawks, might have come out as a frontrunner.

“Students are a pretty large voting block, second only to alumni,” he said. “We’re tied into campus right now and a lot are participating.”

UND alumnus, former hockey player and current instructor Karl Goehring served on the committee that narrowed down thousands of nickname ideas submitted by the public. He said he wasn’t surprised with the vote results because he had heard support was widely varied.

“I think it’s interesting the vote will be between three now, but I’m not really surprised,” he said.

When a committee gathered public nickname suggestions from the public throughout the month of April, Fighting Hawks was submitted twice.

A United States Hockey League team in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, owns the federal trademark for Roughriders and an attorney representing the group sent a letter to UND in April saying the team would be open to making a deal.

UND legal counsel said in July Roughriders would be one of the most difficult names to trademark because it’s used athletically across the country.

Variations of Roughriders was submitted about 650 times by members of the public who had the chance to submit their ideas throughout the month of April for consideration by a 11-person committee though all but one were listed on the “unacceptable” list compiled by a consulting firm.

At the time representatives said the lists could be flawed due to the time crunch and large volume of suggestions.

Variations of “Nodaks” were submitted 124 times to the committee.

The preliminary vote saw 22,307 people cast ballots, or 27.2 percent, out of a possible 82,000 eligible stakeholders. Johnson said the university is pleased with the turnout as it’s the largest online survey response UND has ever seen.

“I think we did a pretty good job of trying to help people understand what the voting opportunities were,” he said. “People assume there were 82,000 people who had an interest in voting but I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

Vote totals for the five nickname options:

Fighting Hawks: 6,960 votes; 31.20 percent

Roughriders: 4,687 votes; 21.01 percent

Nodaks: 4,571 votes; 20.49 percent

North Stars: 3,231 votes; 14.48 percent

Sundogs: 2,858 votes; 12.81 percent

Forum News Service reporter Wade Rupard contributed to this article.