A photograph on the front page of the April 11 issue of the Renegade Rip has brought controversy to the recently concluded student government elections.
In the photograph, handouts from President-elect John Lopez’s campaign can be seen tiled neatly surrounding the laptop that the student is using to vote on.
According to the by-laws governing the elections, it is against the rules to have campaign literature within 100 feet of a polling place. Because the ballot was online, every Internet-capable computer is considered a polling place.
Lopez said he is innocent of any foul play during the elections. “I was even $20 under on the spending limit, to make sure that I was within the guidelines of the campaign.” The spending limit was $75 per candidate, with this cost including donations.
Although Lopez had not seen the picture prior to being interviewed, he said he had been made aware of the issue on Wednesday of the election week. Lopez said that he did not put the fliers there, and that he “explained to people helping me that they could not put them [in the breezeway], could not put them near computers.”
He does not feel that the fliers had a large effect on the vote, believing that they were there for “maybe a couple of hours.”
Dean of Students Don Turney said it is hard to place judgment on a candidate for breaking these rules. “My opinion is that every candidate committed some kind of infraction,” he continued. “From candidates campaigning 99 feet from the polling place, to candidates speaking in classrooms that have computers. There could have been campaign posters out on the Saturday before official campaigning was allowed to begin.”
He concluded his statement by saying, “My point is, where do the restrictions end? Why does one infraction bear more weight than another?”
Current SGA Legislative Liaison Alan Crane, who was Lopez’s opponent in the election, said he campaigned in a classroom with computers. “Technically,” he said, “I was campaigning in a polling place.”
However, Crane defended the action by pointing out that the computers were not powered on, and it would have been very unlikely that any student would be able to log on to vote, since they were in the middle of a class session.
“The difference,” he said, “is that those computers [in the breezeway] were solely for the purpose of voting.”
If the vote were to be contested via a formal complaint, it would be up to the elections committee, chaired by SGA President Micah Card, to decide what the course of action would be. During a phone interview, Card said that she too was aware of the handbills being in the breezeway, but she had not seen the picture.
SGA Vice President Rodolfo Correa concurred that all decisions would be made by the election committee, but even that course would be tentative. “The committee does not have to bring up the item for formal discussion until a formal complaint has been made.” He did make it clear that “we will, of course, be talking about it, though.”
When asked about how the board would handle the procedure, Correa said “we would have to consider all circumstances, interview all candidates before we make any decisions.”
The election committee may have an interesting task, said Turney, “How clean does a student election need to be in order to declare it valid?”
Turney brought up some other points concerning the controversy. He said that the elections committee would need to discern if the handouts were put in the polling place accidentally or maliciously. If the handouts were not put there with the purpose of swaying the vote, would the candidate have the responsibility to patrol these areas to make sure that rules weren’t being broken?
Correa says that it would be “physically impossible” for a candidate to patrol all of the polling places on campus to make sure that no voting infractions were being broken by his campaign.
Crane felt differently, that each candidate “absolutely has a responsibility” to ensure that no campaign materials are being introduced to restricted areas, although he admitted that he did not personally patrol the areas.
He also said that the committee would have to decide if the handouts had swayed the election. He suggested that they could do this by determining the time period that the handouts were at the polling station, and then accessing the election software and checking out how the voting went during that time.
Card said that she and the elections committee “talked about these issues with Turney, and we decided that we wanted to be cautious, not analytical.” She also said, “It’s hard to regulate a game that everyone plays so suspiciously,” and after some consideration added, “It’s the nature of the beast.”
Card held off from issuing any further comments until she could review the photograph and discuss it with her executive board.
Crane said that no matter what the outcome of this controversy, he considered himself done with student government, even though he has accepted an offer to be a commissioner-at-large for the SGA.
Lopez lamented the whole ordeal, saying “I worked so hard to get all these handbills. This is really unfortunate that I may be disqualified because of them.”