Editorial: Vote tampering allegations a black eye on SU elections

These past few days have shown the university campus exactly why so many people are disenfranchised with student politics.

One of the candidates running to be next year’s Students’ Union Vice-President (Operations and Finance) was disqualified for allegedly tampering with votes. Allegedly, Samer Sleiman offered to show multiple students how to cast their vote by filling out their personal information on a cell phone. One student, Anna Gwodz, claims that after entering her CCID, password and student identification number, Sleiman cast a vote from her account in his favour. Further investigation by the Chief Returning Officer (CRO) revealed 32 votes were cast using an IP address belonging to a Telus phone.

If voted into office, this guy would handle all of the SU’s money next year. Sleiman was disqualified from the election, but appealed the decision on Monday in front of the Discipline, Interpretation, and Enforcement (DIE) Board. This is a board made up of 12 undergraduate students who aren’t allowed to be voting members on council and aren’t allowed to be employed by the SU.

Possibly the most alarming thing to come out of this whole ordeal is the fact that Sangram Hansra — the current Board of Governors Representative and one of the three individuals who represented Sleiman in front of the DIE Board, and who also represented VP (Academic) elect Shakiba Azimi in her DIE Board hearing the week prior— suggested that showing students how to vote “is a practice that has historically been going on.”

So even though this is the first time somebody has actually been punished for this malpractice, it’s clearly something that has been going on in SU elections for quite some time. But no one should seriously think you need to assist people through a simple voting process. I mean, we’re all emailed a link to vote and the website for voting is all over campus — if people want to vote, they will.

There’s a huge difference between going up to people and explaining why you’re the best candidate and why student politics are important, and pestering students, telling them to vote so much they’ll eventually roll their eyes and do it to get you to leave them alone. It’s insulting for Sleiman’s camp to suggest they were doing the former. They’re essentially suggesting they think students on campus are a collection of Luddites who can’t figure out how to punch their CCID and password into a login page, and fill out a simple ballot.

Again, this isn’t campaigning. In an election outside of the university, candidates wouldn’t walk into a polling station with a bus full of people, stand over their shoulder and “teach” them how to fill out the ballot. Do you want to tell me how to log into my Bear Tracks account too? Or how to check my email? Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.

Regardless, even if you think what Sleiman did is ethical and fair in the spirit of the democratic process, this is a huge black eye on the Students’ Union. Regardless of whether Sleiman is elected, this is what most students are going to remember about this year’s SU elections. Nobody is going to remember the genuine, hard-fought, ethical campaigns ran by other candidates. Nobody is going to remember good ideas and interesting platforms. Everyone is going to remember this was the year that somebody might have stuffed the ballot box.

To casual observers, this makes the entire operation look like a total mockery. And after Hansra’s comments about how this tends to go down every year, they’re probably right. The unfortunate thing, though, is this makes everybody involved look bad. There are many great, hardworking people involved with the SU and I don’t want to make a blanket statement about the entire organization. It looks like there’s a small, powerful and aggressive group that runs the Students’ Union by intimidating those involved from the inside while discouraging those on the outside from getting involved.

Most years, the general student opinion on SU elections from those who aren’t directly involved is that it’s all just a massive popularity contest. Only around 20 per cent of students actually vote in these things, and year after year, some new person is running on the exact same campaign points as previous years. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it than that, but this is the image that circulates around it to those not involved.

This year, it’s way worse. This year, we’ve moved past a popularity contest and into, for lack of a better term, a complete farce.