If you haven’t already been informed – it looks like Blake Frederick’s disqualification has been overturned.
More details to come.
Update 1: Hopefully the president elect will see to it that members of the Appointments Committee be chosen carefully, and the hiring of the EA happens, like, yesterday.
The system works…
… incredibly inefficiently
- Sonja
Doesn’t the VP Academic hire the Elections Administrator?
yes. yes they do. Actually Alex (M) was also on the committee who hired Sarina.
I thought it was the Appointments Committee which in turn needs to be appointed/voted within council, of which the agenda is set by the president?
While it seemed obvious to us that the EC acted with bias, we knew it would be next to impossible to prove it to the appeals committee. The chief justice did not seem to want to even entertain the idea that it might have been possible.
Thankfully they found for Blake regardless. We would have like to see a recommendation from the CJ to hire an outside entity to administer elections in the future. Based on the past two elections (the ones I have paid attention to) it seems impossible for the EC to act without peer pressure, undue influence, or outright bias. Bringing in peeps from outside the community might address these problems.
Nice to hear. I still think the slate rules, at a minimum, need to be rewritten for clarity.
I don’t see any point to this bias stuff. Why do we have to go personal? The reasonable and charitable interpretation of all of this is that the elections rules are confusing and the EC made an honest mistake. Making things personal just leads to animosity on all sides and makes political progress on campus more difficult. Life is already plenty difficult, we don’t need to make things worse.
Its not personal, except for the fact that there are personalities involved. Last year’s ‘affair’ was due to peer pressure on the EA to not act on irregularities. Suspicions about bias and/or undue influence on the administrators of this year’s elections by other politically motivated students will never be put to rest.
I think the slate rules are fine as long as they, and the rest of the regulations, are enforced impartially. The only way to approach that is to get someone outside the psycho-social dynamics of our divided campus to oversee them.