Over the past few years, ASUO elections have brought with them downpours of grievances.
Last week, ASUO Executive candidate Jeff Oliver accused fellow candidates Bret Jacobson and Matt Cook of breaking election rules by distributing campaign fliers in the residence halls. The ASUO Elections Board decided in favor of Oliver’s grievance Thursday, and removed Jacobson and Cook from the ballot.
But hours before the general election was set to begin Monday, the ASUO Constitution Court agreed to hear Jacobson’s and Cook’s appeal, splitting the general election into two parts and postponing the second half until spring term.
Such elections complications are certainly not new.
For the past four years, a flurry of election-time grievances have targeted everything from tennis balls to megaphones — and they have disrupted the election process, causing delays in both results and election dates.
Former ASUO Vice President Ben Unger said it has not always been that way.
“It wasn’t such a grievance-filled world back in the day,” Unger said.
But for the past four years, beginning with Unger’s run for the ASUO Executive in 1997, grievances have become the major players in the election process instead of the candidates.
When Unger ran with Bill Miner in 1997, the general elections were postponed to deal with a grievance filed against the pair, even though they had won outright during the primary election with more than 50 percent of the vote.
“Eagerly wanting to get the word out, we put up posters on telephone polls,” Unger said, noting it was against a city ordinance, but that the two didn’t know. “That’s all we did, [but] it was scandalous enough.”
The following year, the number of grievances seemed to explode.
Grievances appeared even before the primaries began April 15, 1998, and elections finally ended in mid-May after the court heard the last six.
One of the bigger complaints accused Unger of supporting Executive candidates Geneva Wortman and Morgan Cowling’s campaign while he was in office, sparking debate over where the line is crossed when one sits in the Executive seat.
“When I was in student government, I was trying to live in two distinct realities,” Unger said. “That kind of got me into a little bit of trouble.”
The grievance accused Unger of helping at a voting booth while at the same time remaining an active member of the Wortman and Cowling campaign, an action that ultimately resulted in the court reprimanding Unger.
One grievance the same year targeted a member of the anti-OSPIRG Honesty campaign for use of a megaphone on 13th Avenue, and another targeted an Executive candidate for using tennis balls to get out her message during the campaign.
“That was a big violation because they were giving away a product,” ASUO Elections Coordinator Shantell Rice said. But “I mean, it was a tennis ball. Who cares?”
Many of the grievances called for invalidation of previous election results and for a special election, but neither resulted.
In 1999, Executive candidates Wylie Chen and Mitra Anoushiravani faced complaints after they slid campaign fliers underneath some doors in the residence halls.
“I was an RA, so I was very aware of what housing policy was as far as advertisements go,” Anoushiravani said. “I know for a fact that we didn’t do anything wrong.”
Candidates Dan Reid and Matt Swanson filed the grievance. But by the time it was considered, they had already lost to Chen and Anoushiravani, who had garnered more than 50 percent of the vote in the primary elections.
“We beat them so badly in the primaries that the grievance didn’t really hold any weight,” Anoushiravani said.
The court never resolved the issue, which has left the board without a precedent to follow when considering Oliver’s grievance this year.
More recently, grievances kept last year’s primary and general election results a secret long after voting ended.
In that election, Executive candidates C.J. Gabbe and Peter Larson were accused of providing “a thing of value” during an International Student Association coffee hour, which is against election rules.
“We believed all the way through — I still do — that we didn’t break that rule,” said Melissa Unger, Gabbe and Larson’s campaign manager.
The Elections Board decided to remove Gabbe and Larson from the primary ballot because it believed they violated election rules, but the court replaced them after deciding to hear their appeal.
Back on the ballot for the general election, Gabbe and Larson faced yet another grievance similar to the first. That grievance withheld general election results until after spring break.
Melissa Unger still believes that the grievances, mixed with the media coverage, were the undoing of Gabbe and Larson’s campaign.
“Us being on the front page pretty much every day for a month and a half with all the talk about grievances didn’t help,” she said. “Instead of a campaign about issues, it became a campaign about why C.J. and Peter were so bad because they did this horrible thing.”
The explosion of grievances during the past four years is curious, but some people have their theories.
“I think when it comes down to it, the really competitive tickets are the ones that really, really watch each other,” Rice said.
From the perspective of someone who has been a target in the past, Ben Unger said he thinks the grievance explosion stems directly from the way the board and the court have handled grievances.
“The consequences became so extreme, then it became worth it for people,” Ben Unger said. “Once you start enforcing rules where people can be removed from the ballot, and if you’re losing, then it becomes a strategy.”