I should have known this was going to happen to me. Every exploitation of a crack or loophole has come back to haunt me. This attempt at self-pity is in reference to my disqualification in the Vice Presidential SGA Executive elections, which took place a couple weeks back. While I am certain that my actions did not violate the election rules set out by the Center for Student Election’s constitution, ultimately it will be you who must decide.
Last year, only 33 percent of the student body voted in the SGA Executive elections despite the SGA’s annual allocation of $30,000 at its disposal. In the interest of increasing voter turnout, I felt it was necessary to reach out to and connect with as many voters as possible.
One of these methods was to litter the campus with lawn signs, which clearly worked given that numerous members of the administration, including Athletic Director Mike Mattia, complimented my efforts.
Being a member of the JHU baseball team, Mr. Mattia and I have had our share of interactions. In an effort to express to student-athletes the benefits of having a student-athlete representative on the SGA executive board, he graciously offered to endorse my candidacy. I accepted, and he sent out an e-mail to the student-athletes on campus. Seems like a harmless act, right?
Apparently not, considering I was cited for violating Article IV, Section f(iv) of the CSE constitution which reads, “No candidate may use any listserv or mass emailing services of student groups of organizations in which Johns Hopkins undergraduates are members of.”
The Athletic Director, who is not a candidate as the rule stipulates, did not use a listserv or mass e-mailing service, but instead used a list of individual e-mail addresses sent to each athlete’s individual address.
Seems permissible right? Every candidate is given a copy of the constitution prior to the election.
I read the constitution, saw an opportunity, realized that an action like this was legal and therefore went through with it. After being disqualified by the CSE, I proceeded by appealing to the SGA judiciary, who is the foremost ruling body on these decisions.
Their response commenced as follows, “We understand your arguments concerning the language used in this section; by definition you did not utilize a listserv or mass emailing service, however the Judiciary believes that the spirit of this section does indeed cover emails of your type.”
Wait, what? What does that mean? How can you violate a law in an overarching document such as a constitution “in spirit?” Like I said I should have foreseen being the victim of such nonsense.
So you might be asking yourself, yeah so what, the judiciary provided their own very loose interpretation of the constitution.
Well, to complicate the situation more, I ended up winning the election by 130 votes. That’s nearly a quarter of the votes that I received in the first place. I’m pretty sure that constitutes a landslide victory.
So, not only did the judiciary interpret and amend the constitution in a way to account for its deficiencies, but it also disenfranchised the 760 people who voted for me. That is not in the true spirit of democracy, given that it awarded an automatic victory to the only other candidate running.
Aside from that, the action that I was purportedly guilty of is a completely unprecedented one, and thus I am unfairly being made an example of.
The judiciary should have recognized that the numerous arbitrary factors involved do not justify disqualification, and instead ought to have proposed amendments to ensure that a situation like this one does not arise in the near future.
I think I can make an exception and just use the cliché, “the punishment does not fit the crime.”
If I had only won by a small margin, I would have accepted that Mr. Mattia’s e-mail accounted for my victory.
However, the 130 vote margin was large enough that my victory was not solely the result of Mr. Mattia’s e-mail. Those 600 are fellow-student athletes that I know and see nearly everyday, and I was confident that I would receive their vote.
So despite the fact that I blatantly did not violate any constitution rules, the judiciary still did not recognize that the e-mail had no bearing on the outcome of the election.
After meeting with several administration members who were reluctant to take action in a student run organization’s decision, unfortunately my only options now are too arduous to undertake.
I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to explain why many of you were disenfranchised in this election. Putting all voter numbers aside, while it is important for rules to be adapted and amended, the time to do so is not in the middle of an election.
