Was disqualification the ethical response?

In this column I will attempt to answer ethical questions that you, the readers, email me. You can direct your questions to jhuethics@gmail.com. I am in no way an expert on ethics, but I enjoy thinking and talking about it, and I’ll do my best to answer your questions in a reasonable and straightforward manner.

We all know about the recent SGA election controversy. If you don’t, the story can be summarized as one candidate for VP winning by a landslide, but then being disqualified due to campaign violations. Was this disqualification a fair ruling?

In this response I’ll talk more about the ethics of it than the fairness. Whether or not something is fair is not really related to it being ethical, unless you think that unfairness is inherently unethical.

We should first establish that the rules regarding the campaign were in existence long before the election and rulings, and thus everyone involved with the process is responsible for knowing them and following them.

However, in this case I think that the ruling to disqualify a candidate after a major victory is an unethical decision based on an unethical law. The goal of a democratic process is to establish a leader who has the highest percentage of the popular vote. Governing bodies then implement rules so that candidates can’t manipulate the process too much. But the consequences for violations have to be proportional to the violations for a couple reasons.

The first is to ensure that the rules aren’t manipulated so that one candidate wins. For example if a candidate has more leverage over the oversight committee, the consequences have to be structured so that candidate can’t remove any threats to their victory. Additionally, consequences that are out of line with violations mean that small mistakes by candidates or their campaigns can lead to major changes in regards to who wins the election. This introduces randomness into a process that should be as nonrandom as possible.

For example, in 2008, the Obama campaign paid $375,000 in fines due to campaign finance violations. These (relatively) small violations did not, and should not have, led to Obama being disqualified from running. If they had, that would have been a clear subversion of the democratic system since even without those violations he may well still have been the most popular candidate.

The main difference here (besides the scale) is that the violations at Hopkins were reported after the election had started. In my opinion, the ethical solution to this would have been to have an independent committee review the violations and decide how much of a swing of votes the violations caused. What the result of this review would have been is outside the scope of this column, but the current system, where any small violation leads to full disqualification is a clear departure from how a democratic system should work.