Candidate orientations ruled invalid

The ASPSU Evaluation and Constitutional Review Committee ruled yesterday that candidate orientation meetings held by the ASPSU Elections Committee must be announced seven days prior to their occurrence in order for those meetings to be considered valid.

The ruling could invalidate the candidacy of senate candidates Rachel Searle, Matt Wallace, Reina Abolofia, Golden Ashby and SFC Chair candidate Erin Watari, who are known to have not attended the two candidate orientation meetings held in February.

Indications are that candidates for Senate who could be disqualified would most likely be appointed to seats in the body, as the number of those running for senate did not exceed the number of available seats.

Current ASPSU Senator Reina Abolofia, who ran for election to the senate in the March election, expressed disappointment at the ruling, regardless of any workaround that may currently be developing.

“I don’t want to be appointed – I was elected,” she said.

Abolofia was appointed to her current seat on the senate, and is disappointed that her election victory may now be in question.

On Tuesday, the E&CR received a flurry of new attention request forms, which allow any student to raise a question concerning application of ASPSU constitutional rule, seven total that deal in part or whole with the decisions made during the last meetings of the Elections Committee and E&CR.

Part of that influx was a question submitted by ASPSU Communications Director Adam Zavala asking about the role that the ASPSU Senate plays in determining elections procedures.

The E&CR ruled the ASPSU Senate has no authority to decide election rules.

The committee also ruled dictionaries are not binding documents on ASPSU, but they can be used to clarify misunderstandings of word meanings, that two attention request forms submitted to the E&CR regarding problems with how the elections were administered, where not questions regarding “violations” but regarding “decisions” and so fell under the purview of the E&CR, not the elections committee.

In addition, the case of Logan v. Zimmerman Brush Co. was deemed inapplicable and the E&CR’s ability to refer to state law for decisions was affirmed.