The Appellate Panel of the Board of Elections overruled the Board’s previous decision to sanction presidential candidate Tim McBride, said Vice Chair of the Board of Elections and Chair of the Appellate Panel Zoé Orfanos.
The Board of Elections previously imposed sanctions on McBride for a 24-hour period barring him from any form of campaigning whatsoever.
McBride was being punished because Nate Bronstein, without McBride’s approval, posted a comment on Facebook in support of McBride that mentioned Bronstein’s office as Student Government president, a violation of election regulations.
The Appellate Panel then overturned this decision Monday night around 5:00 p.m., finding McBride not responsible for the charges. The sanctions were lifted, and his campaign was immediately allowed to resume campaigning.
“The McBride campaign cannot be held responsible for Nate Bronstein’s violation,” Orfanos said.
From the time the sanctions were imposed at 12:30 a.m. on Monday morning to the time they were lifted at 5:00 p.m. Monday night, McBride lost over 16 hours of campaigning time.
There was a large gap between the time the sanctions were imposed and the time the Appellate Board met to rule on them because of scheduling difficulties between McBride’s campaign, Board of Elections Chair Dan Lewis, Orfanos and Appellate Board member Jennifer Hirschorn.
“It’s kind of an imperfect system,” Lewis said. “It sucks because they [McBride’s campaign] had so much time taken away from them.”
McBride could have decided to defer the start of sanctions until the Appellate Panel had a chance to rule on them. However, had McBride decided to postpone the sanctions and been found guilty by the panel, the sanctions would have spilled over into most of Tuesday – the first day of voting.
“We thought that making sure students knew how to vote [Tuesday] was more important than making sure that we got to post one more video out today [Monday],” said Phil Cardarella, a McBride campaign staff member.
While the Appellate Panel found McBride’s campaign innocent of any responsibility for the breach of election regulations, Lewis said Bronstein still violated election regulations with his post referencing both his title and his support for McBride.
The Board of Elections has no jurisdiction of the Student Government president, but Lewis says the transgression will be in his final report to the Undergraduate Senate on all the election violations.
“I’m going to say that it was Nate Bronstein’s post that caused this whole thing,” said Lewis.
However, Class of 2013 Senator and Budget Committee Chairman Taylor Yeates, who is also running for SG comptroller, said any charges from the Senate would be unlikely.
“There’s a lot of the policy book that ultimately just needs to be looked over by the Senate and fixed, said Lewis. “This past week has been fairly ridiculous.”
mzoglo@theeagleonline.com
