In the aftermath of Wednesday's now-nullified freshman senate elections, in which several candidates for Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate asked their supporters to exploit a glitch in the election software, many of the implicated candidates defended their actions.
Some blamed the TCU Elections Commission (ECOM); Manuel Guzman, a current senator seeking reelection, said, "I find it unfair that we're put in a position where we're criminals, when in fact everything was caused by ECOM." One can only hope that he followed that gem with a more apologetic statement that was somewhat less reminiscent of an arsonist blaming his poor behavior on the availability of lighters. Fellow senator and candidate Elliott McCarthy came to the belated (and erroneous) conclusion that "the fault was not with the candidates, but with the system failure," though his Facebook.com message to supporters — "Due to an error in the ECOM website, we are free to vote a second time, with all the previous ballots still counting. Please vote again!" — suggests otherwise.
The notion that people who have done nothing wrong are being painted as criminals is simply incorrect. Senate candidates blatantly asked their supporters to game the system. They saw an opening, and they attempted to exploit it. Rather than contacting an official from ECOM to alert it to the problem, they sought to steal the election by having their supporters vote twice. While ECOM could have mitigated the problem by reacting faster to release information or to nullify the vote, that does not excuse the actions of dishonest candidates.
We have no way of knowing which senators acted with bad intentions and which senators acted well. Apart from the Facebook messages a few of them sent to supporters, there is no concrete way to tell which senators sought to take advantage of the glitch and which senators declined the opportunity (or were simply unaware of the malfunction). For this reason, we at the Daily cannot expressly endorse or reject individual contestants.
But we at Tufts expect a certain degree of integrity from our leaders. This was not a case of underclassmen not knowing the rules; this was a case of some students deliberately sabotaging an election for personal gain, and those students who took part should be embarrassed by their actions.
It is not enough to blame the computers, it is not enough to blame the Elections Commission, and it is not enough to blame the other candidates. While we at the Daily do not know for certain which of the candidates sought to gain an unfair advantage, the students who were encouraged to cheat the system should have a good idea. The freshman class has an opportunity today to vote for candidates who respect the democratic process and their fellow students, and we urge all freshmen to use their best judgment to select senators who will represent their classmates, not merely themselves.
