William Bleveans: USAC Election Board’s sanctions are misdirected, arbitrary

Although sanctions against rogue regimes like Russia and North Korea regularly command our attention, the sanctions imposed by our student government officials deserve scrutiny as well.

Each election season, the Undergraduate Students Association Council Election Board is tasked with imposing sanctions on candidates who violate various provisions of the election code. Candidates can be sanctioned for anything from failing to tag the election board in a social media post to missing the deadline for submitting campaign expense forms. Although holding orderly elections is surely a desirable goal, election board officials have gone too far in sanctioning candidates this year.

Sanctions are imperfect enforcement mechanisms for several reasons. Specifically, they are imposed far too arbitrarily, target the most minor missteps imaginable and impose excessively harsh punishments.

Over the past month, the election board has sanctioned candidates for having an unapproved laptop sticker at a campaign event, for failing to tag the board in a social media post and for campaigning on GroupMe without inserting a disclaimer in a message. These are hardly Watergate-level political shenanigans. But the election board seems to treat them as such, apparently having resolved to punish each and every last violation without regard for the expediency of doing so.

The election board would do well to observe the principle of prosecutorial discretion by conserving its resources and focusing on serious violations. The election code’s prohibitions on unfair campaign finance practices are just some of the regulations the board can prioritize in accordance with this principle.

The argument for focusing on serious violations is further strengthened by Election Board Chair Jack Price’s admission that the board does not have an overabundance of resources. Price noted that even the board’s best-staffed committees have no more than three or four staffers. Given the election board’s financial constraints, focusing on more serious violations makes good sense.

The punishments that accompany USAC sanctions are often unreasonable, too. This election cycle, the election board has regularly punished candidates by prohibiting them from campaigning in person or over social media. Besides the obvious difficulty of enforcing a campaigning prohibition on a large college campus, these prohibitions raise serious concerns about free speech. Suppressing speech is not an acceptable punishment in almost any conceivable circumstance, and applying such a punishment for a minor violation is even more questionable.

The election board’s tendency to suppress speech was especially evident recently. On April 27, the board banned For the People, a new slate that hopes to highlight issues of diversity and inclusion, from electioneering for the better part of a day. The ban was imposed just because the slate posted election-related material on social media before the start of the official campaign season and failed to disclose some of their expenses. While these violations should be punished, depriving a slate of the opportunity to communicate its message to the student body is overkill.

Matthew Dunham, the director of the election board’s Investigations Committee, tried to justify these punishments by asserting that prohibitions on campaigning are the only equitable punishments available for election code violations. Even if this is true, Dunham’s line of argument completely disregards the harm that sanctions do to free speech on campus.

In addition to being exacting and excessively harsh, USAC election sanctions are imposed in a wholly arbitrary manner. Price and Dunham said although USAC representatives had pushed them to adopt a rubric to make the sanctioning process uniform and equitable, the election board still has not fully implemented such a system. In the absence of a rubric of clearly defined guidelines, the sanctioning process can seem unfair.

In addition, the insularity of the election board has contributed to the sense that its decisions are arbitrary. Price mentioned this insularity when he said “the election board has been walled off, and is not exactly the most visible thing in USAC.” Without transparency, it is impossible to determine if the election board’s decisions are made fairly. Combine the lack of clearly defined sanctioning guidelines with a decision-making process largely out of the student body’s view, and it is hard not to conclude that the election board’s sanctioning is at least somewhat arbitrary.

Of course, some students do support the sanctioning process. In particular, Price defended the election board’s sanctioning by pointing to the election code’s ability to lend structure to student campaigning. In this sense, he conceived of sanctions as the enforcement mechanisms of the election code’s supposedly enlightened regulations. However, given that many sections of the election code are in fact bizarre and needlessly exacting, it is difficult to see how they really improve our elections. It stretches credulity to make a connection between the sanctity of USAC elections and the enforcement of persnickety rules like the one that bans campaign signs that are 32 feet by 8 feet or bigger. Sanctions, therefore, cannot be justified by the election code they enforce.

Although USAC is certainly within its rights to provide guidelines for orderly elections, sanctioning has clearly gotten out of hand. After all, laptop stickers do not need to be treated like North Korea’s nuclear program.