Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last week's Undergraduate Council elections went off without any of the usual bureaucratic hitches. The Fentrice D. Driskell '01-John A. Burton '01 ticket won the presidency and vice presidency handily with over 1,000 votes each. Undergraduates voted to downsize the council to 50 members and rejected a proposal to increase the term-bill fee. The results were announced fairly promptly after midnight on Dec. 15. All this, and ucvote didn't even crash...
Last Wednesday evening--the last day of voting--the commission met to address possible over-spending and campaign violations by the Driskell-Burton ticket. Possible violations alleged by other campaigns include the stuffing of the first-year mailboxes--a potential University offense, which would merit immediate disqualification--and overspending through use of in-kind donations...
That night, one election commissioner told The Crimson that Driskell and Burton had exceeded their spending limit of $100. If this were true, election commission rules stipulate that they should have been immediately removed from the ballot. Candidates can only return unused campaign materials to offset fines for lesser election violations...
...next day, after Driskell and Burton had claimed an easy victory in the race, three other election commissioners acknowledged that overspending had occurred but said that the commission had agreed not to penalize the candidates at such a late stage in the election. Election commissioner David L. Levy '00 told the public in an e-mail that the commission "allowed [Driskell and Burton] to return unused campaign materials to bring themselves under spending limits"--a statement that is logically incongruous with existing council rules...
...commission's mishandling of the spending issue only scratches the surface of what seems to be a complacent attitude toward alleged violations by the Driskell-Burton ticket. Although commission rules dictate that candidates who commit a University offense should be immediately disqualified, the commission seemed to look the other way when Driskell-Burton flyers appeared in first-year mailboxes. This failure to investigate the matter is especially disturbing because rival presidential candidate Sterling P.A. Darling '01 earlier requested permission from the College to do the same thing--and was denied...