The first round of voting for young alumni trustee ended Thursday night, with seniors picking their top three choices for a candidate to join the University Board of Trustees. Though the first round of this year's young alumni trustee election was not marked by the same public discord as in previous years, several candidates have privately expressed dissatisfaction with the Alumni Association's handling of this year's election.
Following last year's controversy — when Ira Leeds '06 vocally protested the University's policy banning campaigning for the position — the Alumni Association decided to allow candidates to "reach out informally to friends and acquaintances ... to inform them of their candidacy and ask for their support," the election guide distributed to all candidates said.
The rule banned issue-based and mass campaigning, creating confusion among candidates about what sort of contact was allowed with voters and what, exactly, defined a friend.
"One candidate has close to 800 friends on [facebook.com]," a candidate said in an email to election coordinator Leslie Rowley. "If 400-500 of them were seniors, he could conceivably email every one of them ... and then claim that they were all his friends. The problem with ambiguous statements like that is that they give the advantage (and in this case, possibly a huge advantage) to people who are willing to stretch them to their limit."
Several candidates spoke on the condition of anonymity since they did not want their names associated with open criticisms of the Alumni Association.
Concerns about violations
Of the 17 candidates interviewed this weekend, some said that allowing candidates to email friends may have undermined the fairness of the election. From the time the Alumni Association released election rules on Feb. 19, candidates worried about the potential for abuses of the email rule. The other candidates either could not be reached or declined to comment.
Those worries deepened when candidates discovered that Carissa Gonzalez '07 had sent emails addressed to multiple recipients, including many members of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and seniors majoring in the Wilson School.
"I have a lot of friends who happen to be in my major and happen to be Kappas," Gonzalez said, responding to allegations that she indiscriminately emailed people in those groups. "I purposefully refrained from using a listserv."
Gonzalez said she interpreted Rowley's email as a request to spread information to a large number of friends. "When I sent it out, I had no second thoughts," she explained. "I thought it was exactly what [Rowley] had said we could do and encouraged that we do."
Though the email arguably violated the mass campaigning ban, Rowley said Gonzalez was not penalized because "the one email I saw was quite vague and on the line."
"I talked to the candidate," Rowley added. "She was apologetic and didn't think her language had been questionable."
Several of Gonzalez's fellow candidates, however, said that they felt mass emailing should be punished with disqualification.
"There is no campaigning [allowed], so if you are emailing large groups of people, that is a form of campaigning," Rory Truex '07 said.
Disqualification would be a justifiable consequence, he added, because all candidates "explicitly signed that we wouldn't be campaigning and sending mass emails."
"We will disqualify people when we feel it is appropriate," president of the Alumni Association Margaret Miller '80 said, adding that no one who complained about the email policy or Gonzalez's actions specifically requested disqualification.
Rowley said that OIT, which administers the online election, had not noticed any significant evidence that voting in the primaries had been "skewed."
Changes for future elections
During the course of the election, Rowley sent an email to candidates reaffirming that they could send individual emails about their candidacy to "close, personal" friends. None of the candidates interviewed said they were opposed to the ban on campaigning, but some felt that this year's election rules could have been easily exploited.
"I think that it's important not to have to campaign for the position. I only emailed a couple of my best friends and just told them to vote, not to vote for [me]," Dustin Kahler '07 said. "I wonder what other people did, to be honest. In an ideal situation they should say 'no emailing.' "
Other candidates voiced their objections more strenuously. "I was really pissed off — to be quite honest — at Leslie [Rowley] because she knew that Dean [of Undergraduate Students Tom] Dunne was going to send out an email to the senior class at the end of the day," a candidate said. "I don't know why [candidates] need to remind the class when the class will be reminded. That was my biggest peeve."
The Alumni Association has not made a decision about whether to retract the email rule in time for the final round of this year's election in which juniors and seniors can vote along with the two most recent alumni classes.
"Every year we go through conversations ex post facto with candidates, and there are changes that we make to the system," Rowley said. She added that the association would take candidates' suggestions into account before making any further changes to the election process.
"I think there should be a way for the students who are voting to have a more complete profile of the students who are running," candidate Antonio Lacayo '07 said. Every candidate had a photo and brief biography posted online this year, a change from last year's policy of only providing details about the final three.
"You can only write 60 characters about the activities you spent the most time on," Lacayo said. "I don't think that's really enough."
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