Yesterday, Dean of Students Bruce Reitman defended the actions of his office in sending out a mass e-mail that promoted awareness of the proposed amendment to the Tufts Community Union (TCU) constitution.
An e-mail urging students to vote in the TCU presidential election and providing information on the constitutional referendum was sent by a programmer in Reitman's office on Tuesday. The return address read "TheElectionBoard@tufts.edu," though the e-mail was actually written by Ben Lee, the chair of the constitutional reform committee. The Elections Board (ELBO) neither reviewed nor sanctioned the electronic missive.
The erroneous attribution of the e-mail to the Elections Board occurred because the system used to send mass e-mails requires a dummy return address. There are at least 300 addresses that are either full or dead, according to Reitman, and sending an e-mail to the student body from a real address would result in error messages flooding the sender.
"Students don't want to be told by the administration to vote in their own election. I thought that the message should come from their peers," Reitman said. "The most logical group would be the Elections Board, who runs the election."
An e-mail titled "Elections Reminder" was sent out this morning clarifying that ELBO did not send the original e-mail. He stopped short, however, of apologizing for the misstep.
"I don't think we screwed up," Reitman said.
Lee e-mailed Reitman on Friday, April 13 to ask what steps would be necessary to send out an e-mail informing students about the issues they would be asked to vote on. "This would be a purely factual e-mail approved by the Elections Board and would not urge students to vote in any particular way, just to vote," Lee's e-mail read.
Some student government leaders, however, say the e-mail sent to students was impartial.
"It seemed to me to be somewhat biased... and it seemed to me to be coming from someone who was in support of the constitution," junior Jesse Levey said on Tuesday night. Levey's e-mail to ELBO, which questioned the contents of the constitution e-mail, resulted in a flurry of emergency meetings and late-night decisions.
The request for the mass e-mail, Lee said, was in response to an offer that Reitman extended to him at an earlier Committee on Student Life meeting about the constitutional amendments.
"I didn't necessarily mean that the actual e-mail would be approved by ELBO. ELBO would approve of information," Lee said. "It was never intended to have ELBO's name put on it."
The content of the e-mail came from a flyer that Lee and other members of the constitutional reform committee distributed around campus. ELBO approved the poster to be placed at election-day polling sites but never said anything about a mass e-mail.
ELBO Chair Shane Mason "told me that he never approved it," ELBO member Valentino Caruso said. "He said something to the effect that it would be a good idea, but it never went before us."
Members of ELBO met late last night after they received Levey's e-mail and decided to remove the constitutional questions from the ballot. The TCU Judiciary intervened after a complaint was filed by Senate President Dave Moon. The Judiciary ordered that the election be held, but said the ballots must remain uncounted until a formal Judiciary hearing rules on the case.
Levey, however, says his e-mail, which outlined the problems and discrepancies in the Lee e-mail, was not an official complaint. "All I wanted was a correction e-mail sent out last night," he said.
No such e-mail could be sent until this morning because the telnet system was inoperative due to a power failure.
The ELBO says the vote on the new constitution was unfair because a correction e-mail could not counter the influence of the original - what it calls a biased - e-mail to students. Mason said the clarification "helped alleviate some of the Election Board's concerns" but that members of the body feel allowing the vote to count would set a dangerous precedent.
Reitman, however, said the original e-mail was not biased. "ELBO might think that urging people to vote is in effect urging ratification. I don't believe this is true," he said. "I think Tufts students are sophisticated enough to mark yes or no."
Other student government leaders say the only concern was that ELBO's name was used on the e-mail and that the constitutional vote should count because that mistake was corrected before the election.
"Ninety percent of people on this campus don't even know who the Elections Board is. For those that do, I think any damage that could have been done by the e-mail yesterday was undone by the e-mail that Bruce Reitman sent out," Lee said.
Nicolas Ferre contributed to this article.
