While Maryam Belly won Wednesday night’s Student Association vice president for Multicultural Affairs election, a grievance filed by opponent Randy Meyer may require that yet another run-off take place.
Belly received 300 votes, while Meyer garnered 159.
According to Mike Calabrese, SA elections chair, Linda Morales, the director of the multicultural resource center, sent an e-mail out to members of various cultural groups at about 4 p.m. telling the students to vote before the polls closed at 7 p.m.
In the e-mail, Morales linked to pages on Pipe Dream’s Web site that displayed each candidate’s platform. Apparently, Morales mistakenly linked to Pipe Dream’s endorsement of Belly instead of the page displaying her platform.
Meyer filed a grievance to the elections committee about the incident.
“He said it seemed like a member of the administration was endorsing one of the candidates,” Calabrese said.
The elections committee asked to receive a list of the approximate 250 students the received the e-mail, but were told that one of the list-servs Morales used was private and could not be given out.
Calabrese said that the voting rosters were then sent to Morales, who will then check to see if the students that received the e-mail overwhelmingly voted for Belly.
“Even then it’s hard to tell,” Calabrese said. “Who’s to say whether or not the students would have voted for her anyway.”
The elections committee will meet Monday before the Assembly meeting to decide whether or not the election should be re-run.