After Accusations of Bias, Administrators Certify UC Election Results

After many students received an anonymous email Thursday accusing the Undergraduate Council’s election commission of being “biased,” the Dean of Students Office emailed students to state that they had independently confirmed the results of the UC’s presidential election.

The DSO sent its email to students roughly a minute after the election commission announced the vote tallies for the election. The email affirmed that Sruthi Palaniappan ’20 and Julia M. Huesa ’20 had won the election, adding that students could “reach out” with any questions about the Council’s “voting platform.”

Kate Colleran, senior director for Student Organizations and Resources at the College, could not be reached for comment late Thursday about why the DSO decided to send the email — a step the office has not taken in recent presidential elections.

The anonymous email accusing the commission of bias questioned the election commission’s decision to not penalize a campaign for allegedly violating a Council rule about meetings with club members. According to the rule, candidates are allowed to meet with board members of student groups, but cannot share their intention to run with the general membership of the club until campaigning officially begins.

In a 5-0 ruling issued on October 27, the commission decided that the accused campaign’s actions did not warrant a penalty, because they did not “intend” for non-board members to learn about their plans to run for Council leadership.

“It is our opinion that, while this is concerning and that the rule banning the release of campaign information was broken, we believe that this is not grounds for removing this possible ticket from the campaign or the ballot,” they wrote.

The commission did, however, urge the ticket to be “more careful” in their future meetings with student organizations.

“We do, however, warn and admonish X and Y about their conduct,” the commission added. “They should be more careful about their interactions with student groups and be more cognizant of the distinction between interviews about issues and campaign meetings.”

The election commission did not appear to take a hands-off approach throughout the entire campaign, though — the commission imposed at least four penalties on at least two tickets. Penalties included a $15 deduction from campaign funds for an infraction relating to campaign posters, and a mandate that a ticket take down its website temporarily after it published the website prior to the campaigning period.

Boucher rebuffed the anonymous emailer's accusations of bias Thursday, adding that the election commission’s members had been elected to their positions by a unanimous vote of the entire Council earlier this fall.

“I categorically believe that there is no bias inside of the election commission,” Boucher said. “I think that there was a pretty good vetting process for getting people onto this commission, and I have no reason to believe that they deviated from the rules whatsoever.”

“In fact, I actually think they followed the rules much more closely than previous election commissions,” he added.

— Staff writer Jonah S. Berger can be reached at jonah.berger@thecrimson.com. Follow him on Twitter @jonahberger98.