A prominent slate in this year’s ASUO elections, Ducks Connected, found itself disbanded from the election entirely following multiple grievances with accusations of bribery and non-disclosure agreements. While the slate itself was disbanded, members of Ducks Connected were still allowed to run independently for the remaining duration of the election.

This year’s slates, or groups of students running for ASUO positions, included Ducks Connected, Ducks United, Progress UO and Build Back UO. Ducks Connected presidential candidate Claire O’Connor faced accusations of bribery from another ASUO member and reported her own campaign’s use of nondisclosure agreements, leading the Elections Board to disband the slate.

According to members currently within ASUO, these practices of alleged bribery are not new and have been present in past election cycles. New ASUO President Luda Isakharov and Vice President Kavi Shrestha say they are troubled by these patterns and want to change this culture within the university’s student government.

On campus, the ASUO senate serves as stewards of the Incidental Fee. The I-Fee, currently about 9 million dollars, is a student-paid fee which funds ASUO-recognized services and student organizations.

The initial grievance

The week before the election, Ian Finn, a member of ASUO’s Contracts Finance Committee, filed the first grievance against then-ASUO senate president Claire O’Connor, claiming she broke ASUO election rules with accusations of bribery.

Finn said O’Connor, who was running for ASUO president with the Ducks Connected slate, contacted him in early February before the elections, asking him to join the Ducks Connected slate.

In the text message screenshots Finn submitted along with his grievance, O’Connor said the Ducks Connected slate would give supporters “preference to the point of guaranteeing positions.”

“Long story short, if there is someone willing to join our campaign this term and help us win, we will appoint them over anyone who does not want to be involved in our campaign,” O’Connor wrote in her text.

“I was like, ‘Oh wow. This is just offering me this position in exchange for a vote in exchange for working on a slate,” Finn said. “I think it’s really shady to assume that you can just promise people these positions, not even knowing if you’re gonna win.”

In O’Connor’s response to Finn’s grievance, she said the screenshotted conversation was “an attempt to inform [Finn] that I would not be giving positions to anyone solely because we were friends, and I wanted to value the effort and commitment I was receiving from several others who had joined onto my team as volunteers.”

“My decision to add the words ‘to the point of guaranteeing positions’ was driven only by the desire to contradict the notion that I might guarantee positions to those who are my friends,” O’Connor said.

The Emerald reached out multiple times to O’Connor, her running mate Ginni Gallagher and campaign manager Kyle Geffon for an interview or statement. They did not respond.

Finn said part of O’Connor’s offer was that he would not be able to work with any other active slate.

“Had I done that, and had I hitched my wagon to her and she didn’t win, then I’ve fought against the active administration. How am I going to get an appointment?” he said.

Finn said he was hesitant to file a grievance against O’Connor due to the Elections Board’s lenient punishments in the past. “I didn’t really see the Elections Board as capable of doing anything, and so I figured there’s not much reason for me to talk about this,” he said.

After Finn filed his grievance, the Elections Board hit the Ducks Connected slate with a one-day sanction from campaigning.

“When I did file the grievance and I heard about the sanctions, it was exactly what I expected,” Finn said. “I was like ‘Wow, really? What is the point?’”

However, Finn said he was glad more attention was eventually drawn to his grievance and that the Elections Board had viewed what happened as a serious violation.

“I was just hoping that there’d be some repercussions for them conducting their campaign the way that they did,” he said. “I am glad with how it turned out.”

Divided on Ducks Connected

“I pretty quickly learned that the way to get on ASUO is to know someone,” Isakharov said. Isakharov ran alongside Kavi Shrestha in their campaign slate Progress UO. Together, Isakharov and Shrestha won in the election. Starting May 25, Isakharov will serve as ASUO president with Shrestha as her vice president.

Isakharov said the elections are inaccessible for students who don’t already know people within ASUO. “The applications for the executive positions aren’t circulated very widely, so, like, two people apply who were a friend of someone,” she said.

The act of promising people different positions within ASUO is something Isakharov said has been going on for years.

She said once a current president is elected, they will often put up an ASUO position on Handshake for applicants. Even though the president interviews applicants, she said the president will already have chosen the student they promised the position to while campaigning.

“A lot of people are really qualified and aren’t getting positions,” Isakharov said.

The accessibility of ASUO is one of the primary reasons she and Shrestha ran, she said. “We don’t think that they do it maliciously,” she said. “I think this is just the practice of ASUO, and we ran because we were like ‘we just need to change the culture.’”

Isakharov and Shrestha decided to run together during November of last year against O’Connor and her running mate Gallagher.

After making that decision, Isakharov said O’Connor met with them to discuss their campaign and asked why they were running against her and if they had any disagreements with her policies.

She said O’Connor asked Shrestha to run with her for ASUO vice president and offered Isakharov a director position within the executive branch.

“We basically were like, ‘No. This is why we’re running. We don’t like that you’re offering us positions not to run,’” Shrestha said.

After learning Isakharov and Shrestha would be running in a different slate, O’Connor told them she wouldn’t be running in the election.

Shrestha said they thought it was weird that it seemed O’Connor was trying to keep her campaign a secret. “I just thought the whole strategy there was a little interesting and some of the methods that were used,” he said.

In O’Connor’s response to Finn’s grievance, she said three of Finn’s close friends committed to and decommitted from her campaign, leading her to become wary of who supported her campaign.

“As such, I spread the rumor that I would not be running for ASUO President and withdrew myself from public conversations about the election,” O’Connor said.

Contracts Finance Committee member Spencer Rosenau initially ran with Ducks Connected. When Finn filed his grievance, Rosenau decided to run independently. Rosenau said he didn’t feel comfortable endorsing leadership candidates that were promising positions to others.

“Even when the ruling came out about the alleged bribery, slate leadership was certain that the Elections Board wasn’t going to rule against the slate, like they didn’t feel like they had a case against them,” Rosenau said.

NDAs and friendly fire

A day before Isakharov and Shrestha filed their grievance, O’Connor filed a grievance against herself. According to her grievance, members of the Ducks Connected slate were asked to sign NDAs citing ASUO’s elections having a “tendency for malicious behavior.”

O’Connor said the purpose of her grievance was to recognize the slate’s potential violation of election rules and to notify the board of that purpose.

In the grievance, O’Connor said the agreement “was meant to protect the ideas and originality of my campaign and my fellow slate members.” She said the NDAs were drafted prior to the release of this year’s election rules.

“This was not meant to be a form of intimidation or harassment, but rather an effort to maintain the integrity of our campaign, and we made a good faith effort to ensure that all who signed the NDAs were comfortable and in agreement with the term,” O’Connor said.

Isakharov said she had heard members of Ducks Connected were asked to sign NDAs early on. She said several friends came to her saying they felt uncomfortable with signing an NDA.

As a part of Ducks Connected, Rosenau did sign the NDA. “At the time, I didn’t really think a lot about it, but it was just an expectation in the slate,” Rosenau said.

“We were made to understand it was just to not expose basically campaign strategies or personal information,” he said. “So I didn’t have any real reason to be alarmed.”

The NDA signed by members of the Duck Connected slate included four sections going over what was classified as “confidential information,” a “covenant not to disclose,” “obligations of Ducks Connected” and an “injunctive relief.”

According to the “injunctive relief” section, “any breach of this agreement immediately disqualifies the recipient from participating in the ASUO 2022 Election in any form, which includes, but is not limited to, working with another slate in any form or running for ASUO office as an independent.”

The Elections Board’s sanctions against Ducks Connected prompted Isakharov and Shrestha to file their own grievances.

“After Ian’s grievance was filed, then more and more stories and things started coming out,” Shrestha said.

“In the Board’s response they said it was only one case and we were like, ‘Well she has 17 volunteers, seven managers and then she has 23 or 24 secretary positions published on her website,’” Isakharov said.

She said one of O’Connor’s volunteers even put an ASUO position they were not currently in on their personal Instagram page. Isakharov and Shrestha included this in their grievance form to the Elections Board.

In a ruling on their grievance, the Board stated candidates could no longer campaign online or in-person with the Ducks Connected slate. Those previously affiliated with Ducks Connected could still campaign individually.

O’Connor’s campaign managers spoke on her behalf in their response brief to Isakharov and Shrestha’s grievance.

“It is a fact that Claire asked Kavi to be her Vice President,” they stated in the brief. “However, this was not done for the purpose of discouraging him from running against her but rather because she believed that they could achieve great things together.”

The response brief also claims that O’Connor never promised Isakharov an executive position.

According to Isakharov and Shrestha, O’Connor, Gallagher and Geffon resigned from their current seats on the ASUO senate following the grievances against the Ducks Connected campaign.

O’Connor announced her resignation in an email to the current ASUO senate. Irisa Mehta, who was the senate vice president, will be the current senate president for the remainder of the term.

Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 25 to reflect that Ian Finn and Spencer Rosenau are members of ASUO’s Contracts Finance Committee, rather than the Program Finance Committee.