Kirkwood retains IUSA election win

After five and a half hours of discussing six violations reported by the Kirkwood and Big Red tickets, Kirkwood is still the winning ticket of the IUSA elections.\nWednesday evening, the IUSA Elections Commission held the second complaint hearing on election violations concerning two of the three tickets that ran this year.\nNew evidence against the Kirkwood ticket was presented in reference to the March 26 hearing. The evidence found through UITS showed that Adam Pozza, former congressional candidate for Kirkwood, had sent an e-mail from Big Red Presidential Candidate Luke Fields’ e-mail account to Joe Weis, the president-elect of the Kirkwood ticket.\n“In the original complaint, I said I had no idea Mr. Pozza was taking these actions. It was not in any way affiliated with the Kirkwood ballot,” Weis said. “The new evidence showed an e-mail that I had received. Upon receiving it, I discarded it and confronted Adam. There was an accusation that I lied, but that is a false statement.”\nThe Kirkwood ticket was fined an extra 20 percent of its campaign expenditures on top of the 20 percent it had already been fined in the previous hearing, so its total fine will be 40 percent of everything it spent throughout the campaign.\nThe Kirkwood ticket filed five complaints against Big Red, but only two were found to be violations and only one received a punishment. One violation, which received no punishment, involved a member of the Big Red ticket who accidentally sent e-mails to students on her dorm floor without correctly putting their e-mail addresses in the blind carbon copies, a violation of IUSA election rules. Big Red received a 10 percent fine because Kirkwood claimed that it campaigned and solicited students in front of the Gresham food court, less than 50 feet from a computer lab. According to the IUSA Elections Commission, campaigning cannot be done within 50 feet of any computer lab or library.\n“Even with our high level of familiarity of the code, error could still exist, but we went through every length of prevent it,” Fields said.\nThe Big Red ticket also filed one large violation with 14 individual complaints. The IUSA Elections Commission divided the complaints into three different categories. \nThe committee found that all 14 complaints were \nnot violations. \n“These are really tough decisions,” said Sarah McDonough, IUSA elections commissioner. “It’s unfortunate that it took place on both sides.”