Multiple Suits Filed Against ASUC Ballot Measures
Within the last 48 hours, three separate suits were filed against the RSF ballot measure and one suit was filed against the GA MOU agreement. You can view the lawsuit over the wording of the GA question here. I will be posting the three RSF lawsuits later today.
As far as the GA suit is concerned, I will reiterate a point I made on CalStuff previously: a number of people involved in the ASUC insist on not following the rules, and that makes it very easy to file a bunch of suits against them to interfere with their plans.
My prediction is that at least one of the two ballot measures will be yanked before voting begins this week.
I feel like the GA ballot question was set up to have this problem by the insistence on it only being two sentences long. This two-sentence thing is a really strange rule.
I was reading the Senate meeting minutes of the meeting when the ballot language was crafted, and the guy from the GA, Jay Stagi (who is from my department, by the way), wanted the whole MOU to be on the ballot, or easily accessible online. But some people were insisting that they shouldn’t suspend the bylaws and that the language should just be two sentences.
You can’t have an unbiased, complete, informative summary of the whole MOU in two sentences. You just can’t.
Comment by Jim Fung — April 23, 2006 @ 5:46 pm
Also:
I want to be able to vote on the GA referendum. And if I am allowed to vote for it, I will vote for it.
But if it had to have a suit filed against it, I’m glad that Justin is the one who filed it, since he is a grad student himself. It would have been bad for future GA-ASUC relations (regardless of whether the referendum passed or not) if there had been yet another suit by an ASUC-insider undergrad, I think.
Comment by Jim Fung — April 23, 2006 @ 6:03 pm
de ja vou, all over again, again
Comment by captain duh — April 24, 2006 @ 9:11 am
anoter year, anoter case of da GA bein smashT once again. sux to be u guys right n0w.
Comment by smashT — April 24, 2006 @ 10:18 pm
so what happened with the suits? are both of the measures still on the ballot?
Comment by chet, the climactic CEO — April 25, 2006 @ 8:15 am
Yes
Comment by Beetle — April 25, 2006 @ 10:15 am
Justin aka Beetle is about as close as a grad student can get to an ASUC-insider undergrad. In addition, he’s part of the Republican clique on this campus that tries to use its influence over the Judicial Council to win what it cannot win by majority vote. I still think it stinks. There should be some statute of limitations that limits challenges to wording of ASUC referenda to a reasonable time BEFORE the election. That way, lawsuits cannot be used as a political weapon.
Beetle, Mike Davis et al. are all full of shit if they think grad students have been trying to “put one over” on the student body with this referenda. The referenda that get on the ballot are already written with considerable input from an undergrad Attorney General and, in some cases, ASUC members themselves. These lawsuits are a mere ploy to suppress grad student turnout in ASUC elections, while keeping grad students subservient to the ASUC.
By the way, Justin’s right. You can’t sum up a referenda in two concise, easy-to-read, grammatical sentences & have it satisfy every right-wing nitpicker on campus.
Comment by jonp — April 27, 2006 @ 6:26 am
wah wah wah. jon can’t make everyone else do what he wants, so he’s going to ‘expose’ them on the internet. cry me a f***in river, jonboy.
Comment by chet, the climactic CEO — April 27, 2006 @ 7:50 am
jonp-
ur pisT and haTin life right now m@n. i know it sux to be smashT two years in a row bak to bak. heres iz a thouht… stop tryin to lie to d@ voters wiT dese referendums d@wg. juss publish d@ whole referendum or @t least @ description d@T @ccurately descwibes waT is bein voted on.
till then stay smashT s0n.
Comment by smashT — April 27, 2006 @ 8:24 am
jonp, if the ASUC would actually work on the ballot wording in advance and not wait until the last possible minute there would not be last minute problems. However they have chosen to delay the final wording of the referenda. Consequently, it is not available to studetns until the last minute. If the ballot wording was released two weeks earlier, the suits would have also been two weeks earlier.
Comment by Chris Page — April 27, 2006 @ 8:59 am