Candidates, registrar considering change in university policy
A week after it was released, an e-memo from the winners of the UCSU elections, the Drive ticket, is still being criticized and could lead to a change in university policy regarding the content of e-memos sent to students.
Last Wednesday the Drive ticket, one of three tickets running in the UCSU election, sent out a student e-memo titled “Urgent: Vote DRIVE for UCSU,” urging students to support them in their run for office. The e-memo drew criticism from members of both of the opposition tickets, One and Solidarity. Their criticism centered on a university policy banning e-memos from promoting political viewpoints.
“Drive abused campus policies because there’s nothing in the election code about [e-memos],” said Piers Blyth, a senior finance major and tri-executive candidate on the One ticket.
Members of the Drive ticket are maintaining they did nothing wrong and they followed university guidelines when they sent the message.
“We submitted it just like any other message to students,” said Dustin Farivar, a junior political science major who ran for tri-executive on the Drive ticket.
Drive funded the message through a student group they created called Go. Farivar paid the fee to start the group as well as its fee to send out the e-memo. He also paid to register the drivecu.com Web site, which Go used to send the message.
When asked why he set up the group, Farivar said it was created to pay for expenses for the Drive campaign on campus.
The office of the registrar is responsible for screening e-memos before they are sent to students. The CU registrar, Barbara Todd, said the policy on political content only applies to state or federal politics, not campus elections.
“No one is allowed to use university resources to support any candidate or any election issue,” Todd said regarding state and national elections.
Todd added the university will be changing the policy to include student political issues.
“We will add that we won’t be supporting candidates for student elections,” Todd said.
Piers Blyth said the One ticket wasn’t planning on filing a complaint because it would be a futile effort.
“It’s not worth complaining, the election code has no teeth,” Blyth said. “What are we going to complain about?”
It may be too little too late for either the One or Solidarity tickets to take any action against Drive anyway. Any formal complaints needed to be filed by noon Tuesday, April 15.
Election Commissioner Sean Daly said there had been no complaints and he planned on certifying the elections results Tuesday afternoon.
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer Rob Ryan at rryan@colorado.edu.
Contact Campus Press Staff Writer George Plaven at george.plaven@colorado.edu.
