It should come as no surprise that this particular election cycle is the most insane, sad and pathetic one to happen in my brief time here. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I cannot express how embarrassing this whole event has become.
Never have I been more eager or excited to graduate than today, if only to finally escape the complete awfulness that is ASUO elections and our student government in general.
In one of the clearest examples of “calling it,” the Constitutional Court didn’t find Sophie Luthin@@http://directory.uoregon.edu/telecom/directory.jsp?p=findpeople%2Ffind_results&m=student&d=person&b=name&s=Sophie+Luthin@@ or Ben and Lamar’s campaign to have committed any wrongdoings for their pre-Spring Break campaigning.
But as all of you know by now, this is hardly the worst thing that has come out from this election cycle.
Last week, it was discovered that former OSPIRG chair Charles Denson made not one, but two donations to the Ben and Katie campaign last year via Ben and Katie’s campaign manager Sophie Luthin.
In what appears to be a display of committing suicide for fear of death, Luthin came clean with the suspect practice so students could “know the truth.”
Maybe now students knowing you’ll take money and hide its origins is what really caused your campaign to flounder into third place?
This prompted an immediate grievance filed by former ASUO President Sam Dotters-Katz asking for the removal of Ben and Katie from the Executive effective immediately.
But still no word on this from the Constitutional Court, but if I can make an educated guess, their actions — should they actually decide to rule on it — will be as mind-boggling as all their previous decisions this year.
Despite the fake websites, the not-so-subtle altering of websites, mass emails claiming to be from a popular football coach (who is probably more worried about NCAA sanctions than student elections) asking to vote for We Are Oregon. None of these are as hilariously rotten as the alleged hacking of both Lamar Wise’s and the YES campaign’s emails.
Apparently the brainchild of Charles Denson, spouse to presidential candidate and current ASUO Vice President Katie Taylor, the insidious scheme involved spoofing a Google Calendar integration tool to phish the login information for Lamar Wise.
Unfortunately for Wise, he has other problems right now.
The point was to disrupt contact lists that volunteers intended to use for soliciting votes and delete key emails from campus leaders in support of the YES campaign.
With Ben and Lamar’s campaign having failed in the primary and the EMU referendum failing yet again, it seems they successfully accomplished their goal of taking out the the competition.
These idiotic, unethical and illegal actions leave the entire University with a big black eye. All these shameless and unscrupulous acts only further push students away from political involvement.
And how could it not?
Of course there will always be people on campus that regardless of what happens, who is running or what issues are at stake won’t take any time to get informed on them — much less vote — despite there being plenty of resources to do it.
Yet when candidates engage in such behavior, it makes people like me — who actually care about politics — throw their hands up in the air and say, “forget it.”
Now, imagine those that only have a slight or minimal interest. After this year, what do you think those people are going to do?
If they’re like me, they’ll head to their local watering hole, buy a pint and laugh at how woefully pathetic this whole affair is.
The level of professionalism (or rather, the lack thereof) that has been displayed during only a week of elections paints a bleak picture for the future of ASUO and politics in general.
Perhaps the worst part of this election cycle is that it’s just a student election at one university in one state. While any sort of sabotage and fraud is reprehensible, for it to occur doing such a relatively small election leaves me flabbergasted.
Before today, I would’ve chastised someone for not voting when their dollars were at stake. Now? Well, I finally understand why some choose not to and this realization has never made me angrier.
