In an unprecedented decision, the ASUO Constitution Court ruled yesterday that the hacking scandal involving members of the Katie and Alex campaign invalidated the entire executive primary — meaning the presidential primary will restart next week (sans Katie and Alex).
All that hard work and money candidates spent last week running their campaigns and all those votes we cast didn’t really happen. But as unfortunate as this is for everyone involved, a revote is the only right thing to do in this situation.
If Con Court just disqualified the votes that went to Katie and Alex campaign and allowed elections to proceed as normal, it would render the votes that many students cast invalid, disenfranchising them from having any say in the election. The phishing scam that was run through the Katie and Alex campaign was so far-reaching — so incomprehensibly tainting — that the only sensible act is to reset everything and give candidates an election that isn’t tainted by this terrible scandal.
Resetting the executive primary was the most ethical move Con Court could make, but there is one thing that throws their entire decision off. Though the Executive primaries were restarted, the senatorial primaries (with victors from the Katie and Alex campaign, including a certain Manny Garcia) will not be revoted upon.@@http://asuo.uoregon.edu/executive.php?a=12@@
Considering that students generally vote across slates, and that the phishing scam likely gave many senators on the Katie and Alex slate an advantage over their competition, a revote should have been ordered for the senatorial primaries as well.
Did the senators running under Katie and Alex’s slate have access to illegally acquired phone numbers from their competition? If Katie and Alex hadn’t made it through primaries, would their senators? We don’t know, but the immeasurability of this hacking scam is reason enough to reset not only the executive primaries, but the entire ASUO election.
Next week, the polls for the ASUO executive primaries will open once again. It will look like we’ve found a way to move past this Katie and Alex scam. It will seem like the vote will be clean. And it may even feel like Constitutional Court saved a bad situation.
But until they find a way to figure out just how much this impacted the senatorial race, the taint that stemmed from Katie and Alex’s campaign will likely continue to haunt the ASUO.