SGA Election Board issues official warning
On Wednesday, April 8, the SGA Election Board announced in a post on myUMBC that the SGA campaign for Michelle Seu and Lizz Chen had been found in violation of one of the SGA’s election rules. The candidates received an official warning for the violation.
The campaign was found guilty by the Board, in a vote of 6-0 with 1 member absent, of violating Election Rule 15, which states: “The use of resources owned by SGA or any other UMBC office for campaign purposes is prohibited, except when the resources are available for public use.” The resource in question is the myUMBC page of the SGA Department of Academic Affairs.
According to the released statement, the Board received a complaint that “Seu and Chen had posted their campaign platform through a myUMBC group owned by SGA’s Department of Academic Affairs. The post in question has since been removed.”
Seu said of the incident, “We didn’t think we were breaking any rules, but within an hour of posting the link, two different friends were wondering if it could be considered a rule violation. We contacted [Election Board Chair Evan Leiter-Mason] ASAP and shut down the page as soon as we were told that it technically did violate a rule.”
“We want to emphasize that we were not trying to imply that SGA DAA was endorsing our campaign and we did not think that we were at any particular advantage posting it via the DAA page. We just didn’t have an AMA ready and thought it’d be cool to still have the platform available as a link to myUMBC,” said Seu.
The Board issued an official warning to the campaign, but no other action has been taken.
This announcement by the Board comes as part of their initiative to lessen foul play in this year’s SGA elections. In their statement, the Election Board said, “In the interest of transparency and accountability, this year the Election Board will make public every time it finds a candidate has violated Election Rules and issues a sanction in response.”
The Board also said that students should report potential rule violations to Leiter-Mason at leiter1@umbc.edu.
