Guest Column: Calling for safe elections environment at USU

Editor’s note: Guest Columns and Letter to The Editors are pubished as submitted. Submission instructions are available at usustatesman.com.

This last week USUSA elections started and finished. If you are a candidate for a position, or involved as their manager or on their campaign team, you are required to adhere to specific bylaws. Failure to adhere to these bylaws should lead to consequences. This past election, I watched members of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity– including candidates that were in current positions in our USUSA student government–encourage and carry out behaviors that should be punished, yet continuously get away with.

As an average student here at USU, I used to joke that members of SigEp got away with pretty much anything. After participating in this past election, I realized that this statement is not just a joke, its reality. During the election SigEp candidates and their teams went around to on-campus housing, (illegally) knocked without permission at off-campus housing, and took phones to forcefully fill out ballots for students on campus whilst tabling and off campus at apartments(often staying at apartments until those at the door vote for them). The action of taking and touching phones by candidates and their teams without explicit consent is prohibited in the bylaws. Yet people don’t report because they’re afraid of retaliation from the candidates themselves or from the fraternity members associated with them. With these combined factors, a lot of students felt pressured to go along with the forced vote and felt uncomfortable when others–especially when those in current student government positions– filled out their ballots. Some students also reported receiving comments like “I hope you get a parking ticket”, after telling candidates and campaign teams that they voted for someone else.

We’ve let candidates and their teams play by these rules in previous years and let people say “it’s just the way to get them to vote” or “I guess they know how to play the game”, while other candidates get reported and contacted for lies and assumptions submitted to the Election Board. When some reports are seemingly ignored or dismissed without consideration but others aren’t met with disciplinary action, it upholds the idea that the bylaws only apply to some.

How is anyone supposed to feel safe running or voting in an election when these are the conditions that they are met with?

Jordyn McMullin is an undergraduate student at Utah State University.

— jordynmac0311@gmail.com