Complaints of voter intimidation and uncounted
votes surround the Student Government Association
election that took place March 25 through March
27.
Unofficial results are in, but no winners will be named
until decisions are made about these concerns.
Jibran Muhammad, Adam Sowder and Solle Taghavi
are the unofficial winning-executive ticket with 1,996
votes compared to the 640 votes counted for the ticket
of Steven Latimer, Gonzalo Aida-Brescia and Joshua
Ronk. Twenty-five others also have won positions as
senators unofficially.
The senatorial victories of these members of the SGA
are not final. Some senatorial candidates were running
write-in campaigns, and there have been complaints
the online system used to count the write-in votes did
not work correctly and those votes were not counted;
If the write-in votes had been counted, they might have
resulted in a different set of 25 senators.
Angela Bitter, the chair of elections, stated in an
e-mail the elections committee is aware of the problem
and is working to come to a fair solution.
“We are still trying to contact the Web master to
find out how the ballot worked,” Bitter stated.
In the meantime, Bitter said the election committee
is going through the ballots and filtering out people
ineligible to be senators, either because they do not
meet regulations from the SGA or because they are
graduating seniors.
“We are not considering a new election at this
point, but it has not been ruled out as a possibility,”
Bitter stated.
In addition to the trouble in the legislative portion
of the election, Joshua Ronk – who, according to the
unofficial results, was on the losing ticket – has filed a
grievance with the SGA’s judicial committee that there
was voter intimidation during the election on the part
of the Muhammad, Sowder and Taghavi campaign.
Ronk said he had heard from friends that Muhammad
supporters were in Shafer Court Dining Center
“badgering people to vote” and then watching over
peoples’ shoulders, telling them for whom they should
vote.
Steven Latimer, a current SGA senator and the
presidential candidate on the Latimer-Aida-Ronk
ticket, said it is hard to tell how much possible voter
intimidation might have affected the results of the
election. Latimer said even if voter intimidation did
not affect the election in a large way, it still impacts
the integrity of the SGA.
“We saw a little bit of it; there might have been a
lot,” he said. “That’s definitely a problem, because the
university’s rules and guidelines say that you cannot
intimidate or harass people. Everyone is bound by the
university’s rules and procedures, whether or not you
are a candidate for office.”
Latimer said he would like to see Muhammad,
Sowder and Taghavi disqualified, but either way, the
grievance is still important, because it makes an official
statement about the fairness of the election process.
“One reason we’re filing the grievance is we feel that
VCU students deserve free and fair elections,” Latimer
said. “At a minimum, filing a grievance ensures that
it’s looked into, officially, that the election was free
and fair, and if it was not, we need to do something
about it.”
Muhammad, the unofficial SGA-president elect,
denied the accusations and said his campaign operated
fairly.
“We ran a very good campaign,” Muhammad said.
“We have not done anything to hurt our campaign or
dishonestly win the election.”
Muhammad said he thinks the grievance stems from
hurt feelings over his opponents’ defeat.
“I don’t want to minimize the fact that they’re hurting,”
Muhammad said. “But it’s important to recognize
the margin that we’ve won by.”
Muhammad said he would have liked to see the
Latimer ticket congratulate him and his running mates
on a well-run campaign instead of making complaints
about the way the election was handled.
“If I were in their shoes, I would come and say,
‘Congratulations, you’ve run an outstanding campaign.
I wish you all the best for next year,’ ” Muhammad
said. “That’s not what I’ve received from my opponent.
Instead, what happened is I got ‘de-friended’ on
Facebook(.com).”
Bitter stated she hopes the election committee will
have the official results by the end of the week, and
they then will be approved by the judicial committee.
Results will be posted on the SGA Web site when they
are available.
For more information, go to www.vcusga.com.