If the allegations that have been made regarding the Katie and Alex campaign’s email phishing are true, it is one of the worst cases of dirty politics perpetrated under the auspices of the ASUO in recent memory.
The allegations made Saturday night and publicized Sunday night go beyond a retaliatory action in a student government election to a real use of email fraud and elections sabotage. The things that have been made public describe something that is a legitimate crime, which completely embarrasses the ASUO in the community outside of the University.
We’re not going to focus on that legal nightmare at the moment. We’re going to focus on the embarrassment that this potentially criminal misstep may have for the sake of student power.
You see, the alleged calendar website was sent to members of the Associated Students Presidential Advisory Committee@@http://leadership.uoregon.edu/get_involved/advisory_boards/363@@ to try to get a hold of some members’ usernames and passwords. The grievance sent out on behalf of the Ben and Lamar campaign includes an email announcing the website (which would be used as a phishing agent) sent to all members of the committee.
If true, this damages our notion of student power from within. We, as students, have been entrusted with a $13 million budget on the basis that we can be held as legitimate partners in the world of policy. When something like this gets pulled, it eliminates that legitimacy and takes us out of the world of involvement in public process.
The fact that students are misusing emails and using official ASUO business as a trapping mechanism to gain benefits in an election cycle is beyond the pale. Even if the accused simply sent this link out as a helpful tool to others in student government, this would be a breach of the trust students give to this body in continuing to allow it to run their incidental fee allocations. But it wasn’t nearly that harmless. Students are being accused of using the purpose of an official meeting with actual, official business and using that email to forward the link to the false website that did the dirty deed of phishing.
For a student government election, student government officials abused student government proceedings in order to get into more student government.
This is inexcusable, and the ASUO Elections Board must respond. And if they do not, the fault of this action spreads onto their hands as well when this inevitably spreads beyond the jurisdiction of the ASUO.
This situation is an utter embarrassment for members of the ASUO, staff members at the Emerald and students of the University as a whole.