Both Undergraduate Student Government Downtown presidential candidates responded to campaign violation allegations made Monday and Tuesday.
Nonprofit leadership and management sophomore Erika Green was disqualified late Monday night for failing to list an item on her campaign expenditures sheet, but her name will continue to appear on the ballot as she appeals her case.
The USGD Elections Committee dismissed an allegation Tuesday evening that criminology junior Joseph Grossman, the incumbent USGD president, began his campaign too early when he announced he would again be seeking the campus presidency in February.
USGD Director of Administration and journalism senior Rudy Rivas said he had told the members of the elections committee to be on call throughout the election season because he expected to hear violations similar to those that have plagued USGD in the past.
“It almost seems to be a tradition for the Downtown campus to have violations,” Rivas said. “An integral aspect of (the Downtown campus) is Taylor Mall (which) is pretty much a fishbowl, so everyone can see everything everyone else is doing. It’s not like Tempe, where violations can happen and not be reported.”
The elections committee held their first hearing regarding Green’s violation Monday at 10:40 p.m.
Political science junior Clare Irvine, a volunteer with Grossman’s campaign, submitted the violation, regarding a whiteboard used during Green’s campaign for students to write what they wanted from next year’s USGD.
Irvine submitted a screenshot of one of the pictures on Green’s Facebook page featuring her volunteers posing with the whiteboard along with the expenditure sheet Green’s campaign posted Monday.
Green said the complaint surprised her. Irvine filed it Monday at 8 p.m. after going over the expenditure report with other members of Grossman’s campaign.
Irvine said the Grossman campaign submitted their complaint as soon as they were able to review the sheets, which were posted late Monday afternoon.
“We didn’t delay at all,” Irvine said. “We didn’t want to do it at the 11th hour and we weren’t trying to sabotage her.”
At 9:30 p.m., while working on a group project in Tempe, Green received a call from Rivas informing her that there would be a meeting in an hour. Green phoned into the meeting and heard the three complaints against her campaign.
Two were dismissed unanimously, but the committee agreed that her campaign had violated the third code, 7-2.2, which requires candidates to list all expenses, gifts and donations. The whiteboard, which belonged to Green’s running mate Sally Lopez Bravo, counted as a campaign expense.
Green said her campaign was not trying to break any rules and believed the whiteboard did not count as a donation because Lopez Bravo owned it.
“We would never chance to risk our entire campaign over a whiteboard,” she said.
The Green campaign plans to appeal their violation Tuesday or Wednesday, Green said.
Rivas received a submission from a Green campaign volunteer Tuesday around 10:15 a.m., saying Grossman prematurely announced his candidacy at a Feb. 3 Senate meeting. The elections committee met to discuss this complaint Tuesday evening.
At the Feb. 3 meeting, Grossman said he would not appoint people to the judiciary board as he planned to run for office again and believed it would signal corruption if he could nominate board members.
Candidates could not begin campaigning until March 26, and the list of USGD candidates was not finalized until March 12. Election applications weren’t due until March 5, a full month after Grossman’s remarks.
“I didn’t say who I was running with,” Grossman said. “I didn’t say, ‘Vote for me.’ I didn’t say anything like that.”
The elections committee unanimously rejected this complaint, as Grossman did not actually begin campaigning.
Elections continue until 11:59 p.m. Wednesday.
Reach the reporter at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
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