My Opinion
Committing USG election fraud
Two voting booths, two I.D. cards: One student gets away with it, scot-free

I voted twice in the Undergraduate Student Government elections on Wednesday.

Yes, call me a rebel. Call me a criminal. Call me late at night and harass me for making a mockery of the sacred USG voting process if you will.

But don't blame me -- blame those members of USG who still haven't figured out how to run a fraud-free campus election after all these years.

It wasn't tough at all to vote twice. I first got the idea last spring, when The Daily Collegian kept getting telephone calls from people saying that students who had graduated were using their old I.D. cards to vote.

Why would you care less about USG if you graduated? Who knows? But it inspired my rebellious attempt to defraud the student government.

All I had to do was find my original student I.D. card, the one I lost freshman year and then later found after I had already paid for a new one, and bring it with me Wednesday. First, I went to my proper voting booth, in Waring Commons, and penciled in my choice for president and vice president. The election officials properly checked my name on a list and then sliced the back of my card with a razor blade so that I couldn't vote again -- or so they thought.

Then, I went down to the voting table in front of University Gates and showed the officials my other I.D. card.

"The directory says you live in Hamilton Hall," some election official told me.

"Oh, I moved to Penn Tower this semester," I replied.

And with that one simple lie, I handed him my other I.D. card and received my second election ballot.

Just for kicks, I voted for my ethics professor for vice president, my best friend, Daryl, for president and former USG President Chris Saunders for town senator. Proud of my little rebellious moment, I left the voting table, collected another 2 million brightly colored fliers and went on my merry way.

But then I began to realize that I'm not totally convinced that Corey O'Brien and Kara Annechini actually won the election on Wednesday. Try out this potential Oliver Stone-ish conspiracy theory:

O'Brien's campaign staff members (which the head elections commissioner described as "incredible") could have decided they wanted to win at any cost. They then could have arranged for 510 students who couldn't care less about USG and had no plans to vote to "pretend" to lose their student I.D. cards.

Those 510 students could have all gone to the I.D. HUB Office and paid the $10 charge to obtain a new I.D. card. Then, on Wednesday, they could have all gone to two different voting tables and voted twice for O'Brien and Annechini. Those additional 1,020 votes would have been enough to swipe a legitimate victory away from Josh Bokee and Kerith Strano.

The O'Brien/Annechini campaign could have even offered a $5 incentive to all those students who volunteered to cheat. The cost of $10 per I.D. card and $5 per student would only total $7,650 -- less than what the USG president and vice president receive in tuition stipends from the University.

I really have no reason to believe that this scenario actually took place. First of all, I trust O'Brien. Secondly, I don't think anyone involved in USG would ever be clever enough to devise such a plan.

But then again, if O'Brien could get $600,000 for a community center in Lackawanna County, then I think he might at least have the ability to round up $7,650 to rig an election.

OK, I admit that I am being 100 percent facetious -- any sort of mass election fraud probably did not occur this week. So what's my point? (There's a basic journalism question I wish I had asked myself before I began this column.)

My point is this: If USG can't even figure out how to run an election properly, how can we expect our student government to have the foresight and insight to handle the real issues?

It's easy to say that election security isn't important. In that case, why even have elections? Why not make the winner the candidate with the best hair, or the prettiest eyes, or whoever is the best cheerleader? USG has gone through the trouble of creating a very specific elections code, with very specific rules about how long candidates can campaign, how much money they can spend, where candidates can hang signs and how ballots must be tabulated.

Unfortunately, it's only a half-assed elections code, because it doesn't prevent the possibility of massive election fraud should one student have the ingenuity and desire to hold one of the most powerful student offices on campus. If necessary, USG should devise some sort of pre-registration system, or at least work more with the Office of the Registrar to obtain a complete list of eligible voters.

It didn't take a genius to know that it would be really easy for me to vote more than once. But either nobody in USG was able to figure that out, or nobody took the time to care. Either possibility disturbs me.