3rd Election Ordered at UCI After ACLU Sues

The UC Irvine student council ordered a third campus election Thursday, voiding the results of balloting that had been challenged in a federal lawsuit as unconstitutional earlier in the day.

In the surprise move, the student council, acting on the advice of a university attorney, threw out the election results before they were counted and decided to meet Tuesday to set the date for a new vote.

The suit, filed in Los Angeles federal court by the American Civil Liberties Union, charged that the First Amendment rights of a campus newspaper were violated when the student government blocked distribution of the paper, La Voz Mestiza, during the second election May 14.

Results of the first election, on April 30, were voided after about 450 of the 2,400 ballots cast for student council and other posts were found to have been cast through the use of forged student identification cards.

The ACLU suit asked for court orders invalidating the results of the second vote on grounds of “widespread transgression of the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights.”

The suit also sought to prohibit the Associated Students at UCI from enforcing election rules that forbid student newspapers from endorsing candidates during voting and that restrict the posting of election materials on campus.

Named as defendants in the suit are UCI, the Associated Students and Dennis Hampton, the Associated Students executive director. The position is salaried and Hampton is not a student.

Dan Stormer, the Los Angeles attorney handling the suit, said Thursday that he has requested a hearing before Judge Edward Rafeedie today.

Stormer said that while the student council’s decision eliminates the need to ask the court to invalidate the election, he plans to pursue the lawsuit anyway. “The election policies are clearly unconstitutional on the face and as applied,” he said. “Until those codes are off the books, they violate the First, Fifth and the 14th amendments.”

La Voz Mestiza, a Chicano student publication financed with student funds, had published endorsements of candidates during the second election. The paper was removed from news racks by order of the student council for about 21 hours last week until after the voting was over.

No Endorsements Allowed

According to Associated Students election rules, newspapers may not endorse candidates while voting is taking place. However, the student government took no action when another campus paper, the New University, published endorsements during the first election.

Stormer, who called the rule prohibiting published endorsements during voting “totally abhorrent,” said other student election rules, including the one that forbids posting of campaign materials on campus, are “uniformly unconstitutional.”

The ballots were to have been tallied last Friday, but the student council twice postponed motions to begin counting them under increasing pressure from the administration and student groups who believe the results of the second election were questionable because of the selective enforcement of election rules.

Student body president Julie Justus acknowledged that student officials had not applied election rules uniformly but denied that the Associated Students is following a double standard. “It’s true the rules were applied inconsistently, but you need to put that in the context of what was happening,” she said.

Justus said the New University has always published endorsements during the first day of balloting, though it is technically in violation of the election code. “No one even questioned it during the first balloting when it happened,” she said.

Strict Enforcement

But after the ballot stuffing forced the elections commission to call a second vote, Justus said the Associated Students wanted to strictly enforce its election rules, including those that ban newspaper endorsements. The temporary confiscation of La Voz Mestiza was “an attempt to stick to those rules,” she said.

The fake identification cards that invalidated the results of the first election were traced to a break-in last December at the registrar’s office. Although no pattern was found to link the ballot stuffing to a particular candidate, the election results were tabulated but not released.

Although about 2,400 students, or about 22% of UCI’s 11,000 students, cast ballots in the first election, less than half that number turned out to vote in the second election, Justus said. At stake in the long-running election are five Associated Students executive offices and 20 seats on the student council.