USG Tries to Influence Election Rules

In an election, there are two basic type of people: candidates and constituents. The candidate’s job is to get their message out to the constituents, and in an ideal world, merely work to persuade the constituents to vote in their favor. This isn’t an ideal world, and we all know that candidates ultimately are faced with the job of “doing whatever it takes to win.” This is what we saw during last year’s election, and I have documented it very thoroughly on this blog.

This is why we have election and campaigning rules: To level the playing field for candidates of various economic and social backgrounds, to insure that voters have easy access to complete and accurate information about candidates and issues, and to maintain a certain level of decency and decorum during the overall campaigning process.

These rules exist to bridle the candidate or campaigner and to protect the voter from fraud, abuse, and misinformation. It only makes sense that rules should be made by the people through representatives independent of those who will be campaigning to win their favor in an election. That is why it baffles me to no end that USG has created a committee to propose changes to these election rules chaired by a freshman assemblyman, who certainly will run for election this spring, and comprised almost entirely of future candidates and campaigners.

When you read about what happened in this last week’s USG meeting, I do not doubt that you too will be baffled to no end. What are you going to do about it?

This committee on election reform was originally created by executive order of the USG President, Daiman Wolak. The chairman position was offered to me because Mr. Wolak felt that I represented a unique bridge between students, USG, and the administration and was the most experienced and qualified at representing the concerns of students outside the system to the administration.

However, in an outcry of venom and hate led by Joel Ebert who shouted out in the meeting, “I do have a personal vendetta against you!” your elected USG President’s decision was overruled by an assembly comprised almost entirely of unelected assemblymen. Ken Thomas, a freshman who was never elected to USG participated in a series of votes which overturned the original committee, and established a committee which limited chairmanship to USG members only.

Mr. Wolak was left with little choice but to appoint Mr. Thomas himself to the chair position, calling seriously into question the appropriateness of Mr. Thomas’ participation in the votes leading up to his own ascension. Certainly, freshman Thomas, who has attended UIC for just over 100 days, has not yet learned about the importance of abstaining from votes that personally benefit yourself. How can we trust his judgement in promoting election policy that will lend itself to be more for students favor, rather than the favor of candidates, such as himself, running in the next election?

In a concession, the USG Assembly decided to respect Wolak’s wishes and allow me to be the Assistant Chair of the committee. Through this position, I plan to do two things: (1) Recruit average students who are not USG connected, and have no political aspirations to represent you, the people, on this committee, and (2) create full transparency of all the actions taken by this committee by publishing everything we do online for you to read, review, and comment on. The website for this will be created soon.

I was contacted for comment by The Chicago Flame for what turned out to be this published article: USG explodes. As usual, the depth of coverage does not go far enough to portray a complete, much less, balanced picture of the events. While I have always been suspicious of bias on articles with Gregory Pratt’s name attached, I do understand the limits of the medium, so I don’t entirely fault them for it in this case. Obviously they tried to get as much out there as they could in the limited space they had. I just think it is too bad most of what they got out centered around giving a voice to the embarrassment to this University that is Joel Ebert, who was disqualified from last year’s election after being found in violation of numerous election rules and University policies, and who really made a fool of himself in that meeting when he interrupted speakers, shouted and cursed, and then left the room in a tantrum crying after being found disorderly.

Instead, I will leave you with my full responses to the questions asked of me by the reporters covering the topic. Hopefully, soon, I will be able to report more on the inner-workings of this committee.

Jake Nash: What is your response to the overruling of the executive order naming you as committee chair of the Election Committee?

What is the point of having a democratically elected president if everything he does is going to be overturned by unelected legislators? How do they expect to be taken seriously or even appear to be legitimate if that is how they are going conduct business?

The reasoning for overturning Damian’s appointment made no sense. As the Speaker pointed out, they were contradicting themselves every step of the way. First, they accused me of already working with the administration too much to express concerns about the election process. Then, they accused me of not being interested in USG matters enough to adequately represent concerns about the election process.

Megan Calcaterra said I cannot represent students because I didn’t collect 50 signatures to get on the legislative assembly. This is a silly argument. Last year I collected 100 signatures to get on the legislative assembly and 600 signatures to be a candidate in the election. It was a near-meaningless process: you can easily walk up to 50 strangers in the Pier Room and get these signatures and never talk to them again. That’s what everyone who gets these signatures does. It means nothing.

What Megan forgets is that while she was busy breaking election rules and campus housing policies during last year’s election, I was out caucusing with hundreds of students listening to their concerns and sharing information with them about how to become informed voters through my knowbeforeyouvote.com website rather than only promote myself or withhold information from them about other candidates. I’ve been a resident assistant for almost 2 years, I’ve been in numerous student clubs and organizations, and I work with student organizations every week to help them get funding through SAFC. No one in their right mind could say that I can’t adequately represent students concerns just because I didn’t get 50 meaningless signatures to join USG as a legislator this year.

They want a freshman who has never experienced a UIC election firsthand and has spent less than one semester at this university to be the main person in charge of gathering the concerns of the entire student body and then persuading the administration to adopt those changes. Does that make any sense? That is like sending a rookie who just joined the team into the championship game. I don’t see how they can justify this as being in the best interest of students.

The truth seemed to come out when Joel disrupted the meeting and emotionally blurted out that he does have a personal vendetta against me and that’s exactly what this is about while the rest of his party members quickly tried to shush him.

At the end of the day, it all comes down to these legislators rejecting someone for a position who has years of experience working with the administration and forging connections with students to choose someone who has no experience or connections and has only been attending UIC for exactly 100 days, and has known about the existence of USG for even less. That just indicates that all they really want is someone in this position who is naive and innocent enough to be easily influenced and controlled, rather than someone who would actually be effective. I hope Mr. Thomas disappoints them.

Jake Nash: Will your level of participation and cooperation, if you decide to be assistant chairperson, be on par with what you initially proposed while being the committee chair? (Will you still “put the screws” to the administration?)

I am always willing to help out where I can. I hope that if there’s anything students can learn from my example and my accomplishments so far, it is that you don’t need a fancy title or position of power to be effective.

Jake Nash: You mentioned that having a legislatively controlled Election Committee “opens the door to, if not the application, the perception of abuse of” the power that is held by that committee. Can you briefly elaborate on this comment?

Everyone in USG who has expressed an interest in being on this committee is either planning on running in the election next year or will be campaigning for the members of their political party who are going to run. As candidates and campaigners, their primary concern should be about how they are going to win the election coming up in a few months, not how to write the rules for the election.

Even the most well-intentioned person cannot avoid these conflicts of interest from effecting their judgement. But that isn’t the worst part. If this committee is chaired and primarily comprised of candidates and campaigners, then I highly doubt the administration is going to take its recommendations very seriously, and that seems to be their biggest hurdle to overcome. I hope they aren’t just cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Gregory Pratt: Joel Ebert has expressed to the Flame that you, Damian, are being fed lines, initiatives, responses, etc. etc., by Zachariah. He has referred to you as the puppet and Zachariah as the puppet master. In part, he cites the notes passed between you and the conversations you guys had at today’s meeting.

Joel Ebert demonstrated tonight that he is a man ruled by his emotions and rampant paranoia rather than calm level-headed reasoning. He said in front of 30 witnesses that he has a personal vendetta against me and then ran out of the room crying. I wouldn’t take what he has to say very seriously.

I find it a bit concerning that Joel would make such wild accusations based only on the fact that Damian and I spoke to each other and he didn’t hear what we were saying.

I handed Damian two notes during the meeting. The first was a suggestion to postpone discussion of the appointment to the appropriate time of the meeting for which it was scheduled. I have that on videotape and can prove that after I handed that note to Damian, he never even said anything. I soon after spoke to the assembly myself to suggest that it would be a good idea to address these concerns at the scheduled time in the agenda.

The second note was just that he should not be too worried about me not being the chairperson of the Election Review Committee. I pulled him aside to encourage him and explain to him that I was still willing to help with the committee and would do my best to assist their efforts in any way I could. Sara Agate was present during this entire conversation and can verify that this is what we talked about.

I think Damian has a valid concern that members of Joel’s political party are trying to hijack the election process to bend it to their advantage, and I think he was hoping that as the chair, I could bring transparency to the committee’s work and let students know what was being done behind closed doors. I simply reassured him that as long as I am invited to be at the committee meetings, I can at least accomplish that, and the rest of the students on this campus would know what this committee is doing.