The Residence Hall Association (RHA) will hold a new general election for the position of president. This decision was reached after one of the candidates appealed cheating allegations that were filed against him.
The new election will take place on Thursday.
RHA Vice President of Programming and College sophomore Jessica Simon and RHA Publicity Chair and College sophomore Akshay Goswami had advanced to the run-off round in the original RHA presidential election last week, defeating current RHA Volunteer Chair Kadean Maddix and RHA Vice President of Advocacy and College junior Alex Elkins. During an RHA Election Committee meeting, however, Simon presented four allegations of cheating against Goswami.
Originally, the Election Committee decided to disqualify Goswami from the run-off election, but this decision was reversed when Goswami filed an appeal to the RHA Election Council. Goswami was originally cited for posting a campaign Facebook page before 5 p.m., the campaign start time, and campaigning using chalk in a non-designated area.
After Goswami filed his appeal, though, the Election Council determined that Goswami's "chalking" was not a violation. The committee also decided to revoke Goswami's disqualification and instead penalize him with five community service hours.
Upon further discussion, the committee determined that another general election would be held in which all candidates, including those eliminated in the run-off round, would be able to participate.
Goswami, in an interview with the Wheel, expressed his frustration with the way in which the allegations of cheating were presented to him.
According to Goswami, the allegations blind-sided him at a meeting in which he had no time to prepare a defense.
He said he believes the allegations made against him by Simon were made as a last-effort attempt.
"It was brought up only because I won," Goswami said. "These 'violations' were part of the general election, so if they were this significant, she should not have waited until I won. If you follow the code she was supposed to bring them up after the general election. If they were truly this big I should not have been able to go through the run-off election."
RHA policy states that one may only present such a challenge within 24 hours after the election results are presented, but the Election Board discussed the ambiguity of the clause, given that the policy does not clarify whether it is referring to the general or run-off election.
Simon wrote in an email to the Wheel that she was unaware of these irregularities until after the first round of elections were complete. At that point, however, she was told it was too late to challenge.
This type of incident had never happened before to RHA, so there was not a proper infrastructure in place to deal with such an issue, according to Goswami. The election chair and RHA advisors had to reconstitute an Election Council after eliminating the Constitutional Council – which provided the same function – a few years ago.
The RHA Election Committee ultimately determined that the wording of the clause was vague.
The committee concluded that because the clause was vague, Simon was allowed to challenge Goswami's actions in the general election, even though at that point the run-off had already taken place.
"I spoke to the elections chair regarding the challenge as soon as I found out before the run-off, but there was not enough time to conduct a challenge hearing before Tuesday," Simon wrote in an email to the Wheel.
All candidates from the original election were invited back to participate in the second general election because after the initial disqualification, there was no way to determine who would have received Goswami's votes otherwise, according to College sophomore and RHA Elections Chair Katherine Joseph.
Elkins has chosen not to run again, but Maddix has expressed interest in participating in the new election.
Maddix wrote in an email to the Wheel that although he was surprised about the decision of the RHA Election Council, he agrees with the end result.
"I know going into this, the odds may me stacked against me," Maddix wrote. "I'm running again because I believe in my vision for RHA and the tremendous opportunities we have moving forward."
Joseph noted that RHA's processes in handling situations like these is much different from those of the Student Government Association (SGA) and College Council (CC).
"RHA is not like SGA or CC, and it's a much more informal and familial process, and so RHA is the kind of organization [where] we want to encourage people to work together, which is why we chose to handle this internally and not make a big deal of [the elections]," Joseph said.
Goswami compared his situation to that of SGA President-Elect and College junior Raj Patel, who was accused of cheating on the day that the SGA presidential election were supposed to be announced.
"To be very honest, I have no idea what they are doing. It makes no sense to me," Goswami said. "If you look at SGA, Raj Patel was accused of cheating on the voting day, and he just got community service and he still got his position. I got five hours of community service in addition to another election, and all I did was make my Facebook group a little earlier."
– By Dustin Slade
