Student Government Association (SGA) presidential candidate, current SGA Chief of Staff and Goizueta Business School junior Matthew Willis raised claims of cheating against his opponent in the election, College junior and SGA Representative-at-Large Raj Patel. Willis' claims included allegations of campaigning via social media, email exchanges and personal conversations with students on the day of the election, which according to the SGA elections bylaws, violates the rules. After the SGA Elections Board held a meeting to hear both sides and concluded that Patel did, in fact, violate some campaign rules, he was still awarded the position of SGA president. The Elections Board found that Patel's actions, which included a short-lived post on a Facebook group and an email to the Clairmont Campus on behalf of the Hall Council, were not influential enough to have swayed the outcome of the election, and Patel was assigned 20 hours of community service as punishment for his actions. We at the Wheel are troubled by the Elections Board's decision to award the election to Patel in spite of his violations and believe that the situation raises several issues regarding campaign procedures.
We are disappointed that Patel cheated in the first place. Regardless of the Election Board's ultimate conclusion, Patel's actions were a violation of the campaign procedure rules and exhibit a concerning lack of integrity. The rule prohibiting campaigning on election day is intended to ensure a fair election for all candidates and incentivizes candidates to campaign in advance of election day. While it was determined that Patel's actions did not affect the outcome of the election, the fact remains that he broke the rules. In general, cheating should be impermissible, regardless of the extent to which it was successful.
Furthermore, we feel that the Elections Board's punishment of 20 community service hours assigned to Patel is insufficient to deter similar cheating in the future. Such a punishment is a minor inconvenience and appears to be more cursory than disciplinary in nature. We believe the Elections Board should take a "no tolerance" stance on cheating of this sort in the future.
We also feel this incident exposes a serious flaw in the rules and procedures of student government elections. It is clear that there is an essential misunderstanding in what constitutes "campaigning," especially when it comes to campaigning via social networking sites like Facebook. Section Three of the elections bylaws states, "On the date of the election, no candidate, campaign staffer, nor any other individual excluding the Elections Board will be allowed to encourage individuals to vote by standing near or in any way providing eligible students computers on which to vote." While the rule gives examples of ways in which candidates might engage in cheating on election day, we feel that this rule is inadequate because it does not explicitly state all of the mediums through which candidates might campaign on election day, namely social media sites. While some methods of campaigning are more obvious – flyers, speeches, etc. – others, such as posting on Facebook, are not as obvious. The bylaws should also determine what types of online posts constitute cheating.
Ultimately, we believe that the Elections Board should have disqualified Patel for his violations. However, it is clear that the issue at hand comes from within the elections bylaws, not the procedure by which the Elections Board reached its conclusion. While the bylaws list possibilities for punishment, the rules do not provide for specific punishments to particular crimes that would deter cheating in the future. We recommend that the Elections Board revise the election bylaws to fix these discrepancies and prevent issues such as this one in the future. Twenty hours of community service does not make up for cheating in any way.
Moving forward, we hope that the Elections Board and all future candidates will learn a lesson from this incident. Furthermore, in the name of efficiency, efficacy and cooperation, we ask that the members of the SGA move past this incident and forgive Patel for his violations. It is more important that campus issues be solved than a grudge held, and we wish the new SGA the best of luck for the coming year.
The above staff editorial represents the majority opinion of the Wheel's editorial board.
Correction: The above editorial initially included a partial quote rather than a full quote from Section Three of the SGA elections bylaws, which may have made it appear as though information was taken out of context. The editorial above has been revised to reflect a change in which the quote is used in its entirety as well as additional clarification as to the Wheel's purpose in including the bylaws in its staff editorial. The Wheel regrets the error.
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