It's been quite a week at UConn. We won the national championship (!), but elections for the Undergraduate Student Government have really hotted up.
The election, conducted last week, returned the following preliminary result:
FOR USG PRESIDENT AND VICE PRESIDENT
Sam TRACY and Lindsay CHIAPPA - 1265 - 36.67%
Brian INGMANSON and Ali ALBINI - 1233 - 35.74%
Vijay SEKHARA and Lauren REINMANN - 952 - 27.59%
Sekhara filed a lawsuit after the election had concluded last Friday contesting the election results even though he apparently knew of the violations during the elections and did not come forward with them, which infuriated the other candidates. In the lawsuits, he variously claimed that "chalking" (writing campaign slogans on sidewalks in chalk) had occurred within 100 feet of USG sponsored events, that campaign workers were found changing the homepages of computers at polling places to campaign websites, that flyers were slipped under doors without consent of the room occupants violated "a right to refuse contact" with campaign personnel, that various offenses had occured on official USG events on Facebook, and that the UConn Free Press, a notorious left-wing, radical student magazine, published an issue with a back cover that read "USG says we're not allowed to endorse" and then in bold red font, accompanied by images of the candidates "ENDORSE TRACY AND CHIAPPA,", and then in very small black font, "so we won't." Since the Free Press recieves funding from the university, it is not allowed to make endorsements.
I went to the hearing for Sekhara v Tracy, in which Tracy brought up these points:
Do students have a right not to be contacted at all, not just a right to refuse contact?
What determines spacial boundaries on the Internet?
Is every computer with internet access a "polling station" that cannot display campaign propaganda?
Should candidates be held accountable for every action of their campaign volunteers, sanctioned or not?
You can read the lawsuits and decisions
here.
The decisions were rendered last night. Ingmanson and Albini were found guilty of three violations of campaign conduct and were DISQUALIFIED from the election. Tracy and Chiappa were also found guilty of three violations but the USG Supreme Court declined to disqualify them. Sekhara is currently appealing the decision in Sekhara v Tracy, asking that USG throw out the candidacy of Tracy and Chiappa over the Free Press issue. He introduced new evidence that a Mr. S. Sodaro, one of the chief officers of UFP, was a big campaign backer of Tracy and campaigned on his behalf. As it stands now, the election is on a knife edge. USG will likely have to call new elections regardless of what happens, because Sekhara vowed to drop out of the race if both his opponents were disqualified, leaving him as a candidate in a new election sometime in the future against unknown opposition.
Needless to say, I've been busy this week.
