In the University Park Undergraduate Association's (UPUA) brief history, it has had two elections, and both featured presidential candidates who were disqualified for spending too much money.
This violation should not prevent either of these candidates, or any future candidate, from running for the office of UPUA president again, and the student government did the right thing when it voted to strike the clause from its election code that would prevent previously disqualified presidential candidates from running again.
The clause, as several students at the meeting pointed out, was inherently undemocratic. Students are more than capable of deciding whether a candidate's past transgressions make them unworthy of the UPUA presidency and expressing that decision with their ballot.
UPUA member John Richter, the lone supporter of the clause, said UPUA "should be holding the office of the president to a higher standard." However, a clause that disqualifies someone for overspending by as little as a dollar would have been foolish when the election code doesn't include any provisions for banning someone from running on the basis of committing an actual crime.
Gavin Keirans, who was disqualified from last spring's elections, said he felt specifically targeted by the clause. UPUA member Ralph Crivello agreed with Keirans.
If this is true, the people responsible for its insertion should be ashamed of themselves. That sort of immature, petty and vindictive behavior has no place in any group that wishes to claim itself as a serious representative of the student body.
Even if it what Crivello and Keirans said was not true, that clause should never have been a part of the election code.
Ideally, this is the sort of problem that gets fixed quietly, not debated in front of the entire group. It makes UPUA look silly when more than one of its members vote to pass this clause through a committee, yet those same members won't even stand up and defend the clause when it is presented to the general assembly.
UPUA only has about two hours worth of general meetings every two weeks; they should be spent discussing things that actually matter to students.
Even though it was made far more difficult than it should have been, UPUA still made the right decision in the end by putting the power to choose a president in the hands of the students, not the election code.
