A Rigged Election

LAST WEEK the United States sent special watchers into El Salvador to insure the integrity of elections there. Closer to home, it appears that some of the same supervision could have been used to provide fair procedures in the election of student representatives to the Harvard Coop's board of directors.

Members of an independent slate for the board, who call themselves the Coop Group, charged Sunday that the Coop management had intentionally hampered their chances of winning seats on the board. By quietly altering the individual political statements submitted by Coop Group members and by effectively changing the date of the election to curtail campaigning, the Coop stockholders may have successfully eased their own management endorsed slate of candidates into office.

We certainly hope not. With some three weeks remaining before students are required to return ballots, we reaffirm our support of the progressive Coop Group, which is dedicated toward consumer interests and to greater openness in the management of the Coop. The group members currently on the board have helped secure the release of information on some Coop salaries, and their presence has also kept alive the questions surrounding the Coop's questionable labor practices that management has consistently skirted.

Officially the Coop and general manager James A. Argeros have chosen to deny the existence of the Coop Group slate. Argeros told a reporter Sunday that he had never heard of a "Coop Group," despite the fact that five members running under the group's name won election to the board last year and meet with Argeros in monthly board meetings.

But by its attempt to rig this year's elections, the Coop management has acknowledged that it is painfully aware of the Coop Group's presence and determined to prevent a Coop Group sweep this time. The management's displeasure with the Coop Group is probably the best reason why students who have not yet turned in their ballots should vote down the line for the Coop Group.

The group's members, in alphabetical order, are John Adler; William Doherty; Fred N. Gaines; S. Bernard Goodwyn '83; Laura Pollard; Jonathan D. Rabinovitz '83; Eric Reiff '85, Julia Rubin '84, and Joseph Schwartz.

But the damage may already been done by the stockholders fancy footwork; some students have already returned their ballots. We hope that the Coop management will invalidate the current ballots and then conduct an election that does not invite comparisons with the ceremonial electoral exercises of military-backed regimes.