Last night, mere hours before candidates began campaigning for fall Student Council elections at 12:01 a.m. today, the Council representative body unanimously passed a bill to amend the Fall 2003 election rules and regulations.
Controversy over allegedly unconstitutional portions of the elections rules previously led Council to postpone the elections by one week.
Several Council members along with University legal counsel and several endorsing organizational leaders met over the last week to address concerns raised at the Nov. 4 Council meeting regarding the passage of a streamlined version of the old election rules.
Under the amended rules, the Elections Committee now has some enforcement measures such as warnings, punitive fines and expulsion from the election. The Elections Committee or its chair also can initiate any pertinent UJC or Honor actions if a candidate violates the standard code of conduct or the Honor code.
The new set of election rules does not include any regulations on disclosure of expenditures. The only stipulation is that endorsing organizations cannot use student activities fund money to finance campaign efforts.
College Rep. Tanay Amin said he was disappointed the rules did not include a legalized report mechanism.
"There is no visibility in these rules," he said. "In other election processes you do have visibility and you know what each person spends on a campaign."
Lela Graham, a representative for the School of Continuing and Professional Studies, said she thought the workgroup had worked through the main problems.
"There are only nine people running [in the fall elections] and I don't think we'll have a problem with people spending huge amounts of money during this election," she said.
Nine candidates are running for the four open College and one open Engineering Council representative seats.
Sowers said he also recognized representative concerns but emphasized the necessity to pass the rules or the candidates would not be able to start their campaigns today as planned.
"It's vital to pass [the election rules] tonight intact," he said. "It's unfortunate that there are things that we want that we can't include in [these rules] but it's just not possible."
Sowers pointed to the logistical problems associated with creating a legally sound expenditure regulating system in the short period of time they had to revise the rules.
However, he added that Council can work with legal counsel over the next few months in order to account for these campaign concerns in the election rules for the new proposed board of elections.
University legal counsel Rick Kast attended the Council meeting last night in order to answer Council members' questions about the revision of the election rules.
"It is a complex legal area," Kast said. "These expenditures are free speech issues."
Kast said the courts basically have equated money with speech, so the regulation of expenditures is not legally feasible at this time.
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