The Undergraduate Students Association Council will hold a special election this fall to fill two seats at the council table: the General Representative 2 position after Nihal Satyadev’s resignation over summer, and the new transfer representative position.
With an early election sure to set the tone for USAC’s work the rest of the year, the pressure on all candidates and on the election board chair, Shagun Kabra, to hold fair and productive races couldn’t be higher.
Nothing is more pivotal in achieving a fair election than holding all candidates for student government office to the same standard as their counterparts at the local, state and national levels. Holding them to that standard begins with reforming the election code to reflect local, state and national standards for campaign finance disclosure.
This board has written before about the importance of campaign finance disclosure in student government elections. But it is critical that we stop looking at the change as an ideal to be achieved at some unspecified later date. Kabra should reform the code well before elections take place in October, and it should hold all candidates for USAC to the standards set by state and national legislation.
The student government bylaws currently don’t say a word about disclosing campaign contributions or donations, and in fact do not even provide an avenue for disclosure for anyone who wishes to do it. The accusations of improper campaign finance disclosure against University of California Student Regent-Designate Avi Oved this summer encapsulated the worst potential consequences of this oversight.
Oved was accused of receiving money from a prominent supporter of pro-Israel organizations, Adam Milstein, when he ran for internal vice president of USAC in 2013. Many of his constituents would likely have found that contribution troubling, given Milstein’s political stances. But they didn’t find out about the connection between Milstein and Oved until well after the fact.
And, perhaps more pertinently, so should the election code, which falls well short of state and national standards.
In California, the Political Reform Act of 1974, otherwise known as Proposition 9, requires that all campaign contributions and expenditures be disclosed in state elections. The Federal Election Campaign Act requires that all candidates for a national office disclose contributions from several sources, including political action committees and individuals in excess of $200.
It is imperative that Kabra and the rest of the election board take recent campaign finance controversies to heart and make a change to the code that reflects this reality before the upcoming special elections are worse off for their inaction.