After initially refusing to disclose the results of the original Grand Marshal election early last week, the Rules and Elections Committee of the Student Senate posted their numbers late last week. The final count showed that Carlos Perea ’07 won that election by a margin of four votes.
A runoff election was held the next week because in the original election, six ballots were determined to have been lost somewhere in the process. That election was decided to be the final vote of the student body by RNE, and Zack Freeman ’07 was elected into office.
Significant speculation, however, remains on the subject. Kim Conway ’06, chair of RNE, says that she does not believe that five of the six ballots that were called lost ever existed. Student election ballots are given serial numbers to track them through the process. The five ballots in question were sequentially numbered, and the likelihood that they were each given to students and each subsequently lost is very low, according to Conway, who hypothesized that they never existed due to printer error. The committee, however, could not prove this theory, and decided to err on the side of caution by calling for a runoff election.
There is now at least one Judicial Board case pending on the matter, arguing that RNE does not have the constitutional authority to call for a runoff election. Conway said she had been asked by the Board to provide some information to help them decide the case, such as a blank ballot.
“The Judicial Board has the room to interpret things that the Rules and Elections Committee does not,” Conway explained. “As far as the Rules and Elections Committee, we made the right decisions at all the right points, but now the J-Board might have something to say,” she continued.
Emilio Perez ’07, chair of the J-Board, declined to comment on any pending cases. The Judicial Board is the body of student government charged with determining the appropriateness of actions under the Union Constitution as well as adjudicating student disciplinary matters.
Perea said that he feels slighted by the whole process. “I definitely think that the election could have been handled better and a more thorough investigation could have been conducted,” he said, continuing that it was unfair to ask for students to vote twice. He cited the lower turnout on the second election as proof that students were tired of the process.
He will not, however, be filing his own J-Board case. “If I pushed anything through, I would gain nothing from it,” he said, explaining that taking action like that would just alienate him from the Student Senate that he might have to lead if the J-Board rules that the runoff was invalid. “If someone else wanted to do it, I would support it, but I wouldn’t help too much,” he explained.
Freeman disagreed. “RNE acted responsibly, and I have no qualms about that,” he said. He explained that the election trend shows that with every election he received more votes from students, so he is confident that more students heard what he stood for and he was the real choice of the student body at the end.
