The Board of Elections (BoE) has taken a lot of flak for disqualifying candidates in Student Council elections this year.
For the most part, the board's response to these complaints has been simple: It feels the disqualifications have been fair because all candidates were briefed on the rules in advance.
What BoE members haven't told other students is that they don't all agree with the rules they're enforcing.
"I feel as though the rules we have right now [should] be revised in several different ways," said board member Eric Wolkoff.
BoE co-chair Mary Keough suggested a complete revamping of the rules for next year to make it easier to campaign.
Currently, there are a number of detailed rules that candidates for StuCo must follow. But Keough, along with other BoE and StuCo members, proposed a minimalist approach to restrictions next year.
Candidates should still be required to attend meetings and turn in a spending report, and the BoE should prohibit negative campaigning and disqualify students who break University policies or federal and state laws, said Keough. She said that almost anything else should be legal.
StuCo president Manish Gala offered a similar approach. In addition to following federal and state laws, Gala said candidates should be required only to follow spending limits and avoid negative campaigning.
The current detailed rules, according to Gala, are "a giant, giant burden [and] a detriment to the campaign."
"We may be micromanaging the rules too much," said Wolkoff.
Wolkoff said that candidates must meet deadlines and obey the spending limit, but otherwise the rules should be no more stringent than University policies, and the BoE shouldn't take into account too many minor issues.
Board members explained a number of advantages to reducing the number of rules.
Keough said that looser regulations -- such as allowing candidates to pass out buttons, a practice currently forbidden by BoE rules -- would allow candidates and the student body to get more excited about elections. This, she said, would lead to more candidates and help increase voter turnout.
Proposed changes would also "allow for a little more free speech," said Wolkoff.
But not all BoE members were as certain that the rules should be changed.
Board member Matthew Bouloubasis said that he hopes to extend the campaign period in order to increase voter turnout, but that he doesn't know whether or not the rules should be changed.
"The rules we used in these elections were good rules," he said, and deciding whether or not to change them "would require a thorough review."
Sandeep Singh, another BoE member, complained that the board's constitution isn't very well written. But he warned against making the rules too open-ended.
"The rules are strict, [but] if we did have more open-ended rules, candidates could manipulate them," he said. Open rules, according to Singh, can "lead to vague problems with no definite solutions."
BoE co-chair Judy Tomkins and members Rick Aseltine and Dan Herr could not be reached for comment.
Whatever BoE and StuCo members decide to do, the changes will likely wait until next year.
Keough explained that the board focused on improving the online voting system for most of the year, and before executive elections needed to recruit new members. Between executive board elections and class elections, BoE members said there was not enough time to change the rules.
Rule changes will require similar changes to the BoE's constitution, said Wolkoff. StuCo would have had to approve these changes, a process Wolkoff said would have taken longer than the two weeks between executive board and class elections.
Despite the fact that these rules were not changed before elections, BoE members said the elections were fair. They said that because candidates were all informed of the rules in advance, any disqualifications made were warranted.
"There's no doubt in my mind the candidates knew the rules," said Wolkoff. "[And] a rule is a rule -- it has to be enforced."
Still, Gala said he was "quite disappointed the rules weren't changed. It's incomprehensible [not to change the rules for the recent elections]."
He said that StuCo will ensure rules are changed for next year's elections when it selects a new BoE. StuCo president-elect Charles Reyner also favored reviewing campaign rules.
"It's obvious that there are problems," he said.
But Reyner also hoped other problems would be addressed. He said that punishments for violations should be changed and that the BoE should give students more advance notice for elections, so candidates can better prepare.
