After an almost two-year long process, a new election policy was approved by SGA at the Feb. 6 senate meeting.
The Rules and Organizations committee (RAOC) began rewriting the policy in April 2023 following an infraction hearing that arose questions about the clearness of the policy and disqualified the Green Action Fund from receiving funding for a year, according to previous Scribe reporting.
“It seemed vague enough that the Green Action Fund wasn’t given enough direction on what’s prohibited and what’s allowed, so that kind of spurted out this new policy to help better define what exactly we’re going to prohibit in these elections,” Robin Levisky, chair of the rules and organizations committee, said.
RAOC had 20 meetings during the 2023-2024 school year, and Levisky said they worked on the new policy at nearly every meeting. These meetings are open to the public, and Levisky said that occasionally students would come and give input on the policy.
When drafting the new policy, Levisky drew inspiration from CU-Denver, CU-Boulder and CSU-Pueblo’s election policies. The old policy was nine pages long, and the new one is 17 pages.
Levisky said the largest difference between this policy and the old policy is the section on prohibited conduct.
The old policy defines prohibited conduct as “behavior that threatens the integrity of the election, is not demonstrative of student government leaders, and/or is incongruent with the letter or spirit of this policy to engage in a civil and respectful manner.” The old policy also said, “prohibited conduct includes, but is not limited to…” followed by a list of examples.
Levisky said this language gave the election commission the power to interpret prohibited conduct however they wanted.
The new policy defines nine campaign restrictions in the prohibited conduct section with definitions for each restriction. The largest section, restrictions on campaigning, outlines where parties can campaign and where and how campaign materials should be posted.
Both policies utilize a merit point system for infractions to determine consequences.
The old policy divided infractions into minor, major and disqualifying consequences. Minor infractions received two points, major infractions received five points and disqualifying infractions received 10 points.
An accumulation of 10 points from any number of infractions would result in being disqualified from the ballot. The old policy gave the election commission “sole authority over making determinations regarding infractions.”
The new policy divides infractions into four classes, A, B, C and D. Parties must now receive 12 points instead of 10 in order to be disqualified.
- Class A: 12 points
- Class B: 10 points
- Class C: 6 points
- Class D: 2 points
Each campaign restriction has been assigned an infraction class in the new policy, no longer allowing the election commission to determine the severity of the infraction. Under the new policy, not following a campaign restriction would be assessed as a Class C infraction.
The new election policy allows for preliminary election results to be posted 48 hours after the polls close if there are allegations of prohibited conduct. In spring 2023, election results couldn’t be posted until the GAF infraction was resolved, leading to frustration from students running in races unaffected by the infraction.
In fall 2024, Levisky worked with Noelle San Souci, director of student engagement, Brad Bayer, senior executive director of student life and assessment, and Mike Pasque, senior assistant of the CU university counsel to fix the wording that caused frustration.
On Feb. 6, the judicial board approved the new policy. Levisky presented the policy at the senate meeting that evening where it was unanimously approved.
“I hope those running for office approach [the new policy] with an open mind,” Levisky said. “I won’t lie, this is a big change, especially those who have ran before, but for those in the election, I really want to hear from them if they think these changes were helpful [or] if we’ll need to make more changes in the future.”
Levisky plans to send out an email to all of the candidates after the upcoming SGA election to get feedback on the new policy. Any amendments made to the policy will need to be approved by the judicial board and the senate.
The new election policy can be found on the SGA website.
Photo via The Scribe Archives.