Forum invalidates students' ballots
Campus Times
May 21, 1999
The Associated Student Federation (ASF) Forum elections were scheduled
to be held Monday and Tuesday of this week, and the results were to be in
by Wednesday. But that was not meant to be.
On Monday morning, the ASF executive board decided to void the ballots
that had been submitted at that point. New elections were held yesterday
and today. What happened?
"There were some discrepancies with the ballots regarding the elections,"
said ASF President Michael Morrow. "A couple of applications were not
where they were supposed to be and, therefore, their names did not get included
on the ballot when I printed them out."
"I turned the application in on Tuesday," said junior public
administration major Giselle Matus, who is running for the vice president
of advocacy position. "On Friday it was gone."
Morrow said "these errors were not discovered until after the voting
had already started," after people noticed that names were missing
from the ballot.
He said, "Someone would say, 'I saw so-and-so's application in
the box.' We know that it was turned in at some point."
Morrow said that, because of such discrepancies, the board decided to
void election votes that had been placed up to that point and to reschedule
the elections for yesterday and today.
"The only way it could fairly be corrected was to start over,"
Morrow said.
Matus, the current ASF Board of Trustees Representative, said that Morrow
said he had never seen the application and did not want to halt the election
process.
New elections were to be held Tuesday and yesterday, but they were changed
again to yesterday and today.
"We went through a lot of variations, but it was decided at the
end of Monday that we would go with a Thursday-Friday election," Morrow
said.
According to Forum member Valency Rasmussen, elections did not take
place on Tuesday because the people responsible for setting up the election
booth did not have time.
Morrow said he does not know how and why the applications disappeared.
"That is something that we're trying to look into, but we're not
sure [if] we can or ever will be able to find out what exactly did happen,"
he said.
Rasmussen said, "I think somebody took it on purpose; because if
you dropped it or misplaced it, someone would have found it. "It would
be in the office. But it wasn't in the office; we looked everywhere and
it is not here."
Morrow said, "We're going to try to revamp the process for next
year's group to learn from what happened with this and to figure out some
way to more securely store the applications."
Forum member Deserie Gallegos, who is running for secretary, was also
not put on the ballot. The sophomore psychology major's grade point average
(G.P.A.) had not been updated by the Registrar's Office. To be a member
of ASF, one needs a G.P.A. of at least 2.5.
"There was at least one person that I know of, and there may be
more, who, when we did G.P.A. verification checks [did not receive the correct
G.P.A.]," said Morrow. "The Registrar's Office gave us a lower
number than 2.5. However, apparently on some of the applications, January
Interterm was not included.
"And at least in her [Gallegos'] case, it was enough to push her
over the 2.5 and make her eligible for an ASF position."
