Disputed CSUN Election Upheld

The all-minority slate that won a Cal State Northridge student government election last month held on to its disputed victory Tuesday, but perhaps only temporarily.

A student-run elections committee concluded that the way the regulations are written, the minority slate could not be disqualified, despite several campaign violations.

But at its meeting next week, the student senate will vote on whether to hold a new election.

The senate agreed Tuesday to take up the issue after a student presented evidence he said demonstrated voter fraud that benefited We the People, the slate of black, Latino and Asian American candidates.

Before the senate session, the student government elections committee concluded that We the People could not be stripped of its victory on the basis of campaign violations.

The regulations specify that three infractions by an individual candidate are grounds to invalidate the candidate’s election. But there is nothing in the rules about disqualifying entire slates of candidates, and it was against the whole slate that the allegations of improprieties were made, the committee determined.

“It was through the inconsistencies of the language in the election code that brought forth this [decision] by the elections committee,” said Yolanda Kairouz, director of elections.

“I had confidence we were right,” said Joaquin Macias, president-elect and leader of the We the People slate--which would be the first all-minority group to run student government at CSUN--after the committee ruling.

“I’m extremely excited; this is a victory for the students. It proved the system was flawed but we still persevered,” he said.

One of the items on his agenda over the next school year will be a revision of the elections code, Macias said.

But at Tuesday’s student senate meeting, student Perry Rod brought several charts that displayed statistics he said pointed to election fraud. Rod, a junior who had been a senator last semester, said that a comparison of this year’s election with the 1995 election showed that the number of freshmen and sophomores who voted had doubled. He said that was statistically impossible.

Rod said 12 students complained during the March 18 election that when they tried to vote, using the university’s touch-tone telephone method, they were told by the computer that they had already voted. That method allows students to cast ballots via telephone by keying in a series of 17 numbers, including a confidential identification number and their birth dates.

Rod suggested that upper level students who counseled freshmen and sophomores may have gotten access to their identification numbers and electronically cast ballots in their names.

Though Rod’s theories were not proved, several senate members said they were intrigued enough by his evidence to put a motion on the agenda for next week’s meeting to discuss holding a new election.

Jon Hatemi--current Associated Students vice president and presidential candidate of the Students First slate which ran against We the People--said his group was not trying to overturn the election and he did not want to win by default.

Students First wanted election regulators to deal with its accusations against the other slate, he said, including campaign overspending and invalid endorsements, and also hoped to get university administrators to forbid the faculty to intervene in student elections.

Students First said that some instructors urged their classes to vote for the minority slate or even lined them up at nearby telephones to vote as a group.

Currently the school does not specifically prohibit faculty or staff becoming involved in student elections.

University administrators looked into six allegations against a graduate student, two staff members, a part-time faculty member and another yet-to-be identified person after students complained they were campaigning in their classrooms on behalf of We the People. But university officials said they found no evidence of wrongdoing.

“We thought we ran a real good election,” Hatemi said. “We obeyed all the rules and they didn’t. Is that wrong? Yeah, I think that’s wrong.”

Supporters of We the People argued that the slate had too little time or notice to defend themselves and the election committee procedures were unfair.

The accusations of campaign irregularities are “nit-picking,” said Martha Figueroa, who said she supported Macias. Throwing out the election results would be tantamount to saying that she and the other voters who cast 54% of the election’s 2,411 votes for We the People were “incompetent voters,” she said.

If the Students First slate is unhappy, she said, “Let them try again next year and good luck.”

If there is to be another election it must be done within the next four weeks, before the end of the school year.

If the student senate upholds the results of the election, We the People candidates will take office June 1.