Despite David Bass’s nearly 300-vote win in the March 5 to 6 Student Association presidential election ‘ and amid allegations of sexual blackmail ‘ the race will be rerun because of a campaign financing infraction of Bass’.

The new election, which will take place Thursday, March 22, will also include a two-way runoff of the race for vice president for academic affairs and a rerun of a nonbinding referendum meant to gauge student support for the New York Public Interest Research Group, a statewide student action and lobbying organization.

The presidential race, as it has in years past, devolved into a fracas of grievances following grievances. Although Bass had filed a number of them against Belsky, during the race, Belsky’s assertion that Bass had not filed his campaign financial paperwork on time put Belsky’s name back on the ballot for a revote.

Candidates are allotted $50 for financing their campaigns, and are required to submit receipts by March 2, as stipulated in elections bylaws. Bass, who is the current vice president for multicultural affairs, did not provide his receipts until March 12 ‘ the same day Belsky, currently the executive vice president, filed his grievance. According to Belsky, failure to turn in the records might be indicative of a larger financial violation and grounds for a new election.

Bass argued that a conversation and an e-mail with Michael Boykin, the elections committee chair who also filed a second grievance against Bass for harassment, suggested that the deadline was not going to be strictly enforced.

‘The receipts thing was stupid, I screwed up, I made a mistake,’ Bass said.

He testified to both the elections committee and the judicial board that he had two private meetings with Belsky to convince him amicably that the original vote should stand and Belsky should retract the grievance.

‘I was confident that I would win, but why should I have to [run again] over receipts?’ Bass said.

But the elections committee ‘ and upon appeal, the judicial board ‘ decided to uphold Belsky’s complaint and rerun the election.

Blackmail?

On the same evening that arguments were being heard about Belsky’s grievance toward Bass, the vice president for University Programming, Sandi Dube, and Boykin jointly filed their own grievance on Belsky’s behalf. They alleged that Bass had tried to blackmail Belsky during one of the two private Monday meetings ‘ behind closed doors, with no witnesses ‘ by threatening to spread rumors about supposed ‘relations’ between the two back in high school.

According to Belsky (through Boykin and Dube), Bass approached him and asked for a private meeting, during which he told Belsky if he did not drop out of the race he would ‘tell everyone’ about the alleged encounter.

After consulting with friends ‘ including Boykin ‘ Belsky filed a report of harassment with Binghamton’s New York State University Police and a grievance with the Elections Committee.

‘It’s wrong,’ Belsky said. ‘The [Elections] Committee decided the election should be rerun, and I got threatened. And I don’t think that’s the kind of president the SA deserves. If he’d blackmail me, who else would he blackmail?’

Bass denied that the conversation went the way Belsky described it and that the two had ever had relations, calling the allegations of blackmail ‘completely false’ and ‘shocking,’ although he acknowledged that the exchange between the two in the closed-off Old University Union classroom was emotional.

‘I told him, ‘David, I won by over 300 votes. If I have to, I’ll do it again,’ Bass said. ‘I told him that this receipt thing was bullshit.’

Bass and Belsky have known each other since grade school; they attended the same Jewish youth group, and their parents were members of the same pool club. Now, Belsky says he can’t be in the same room as Bass, which is why Dube and Boykin ‘ who stepped down as elections chair ‘ filed the grievance for him.

Bass said that Belsky was merely pursuing the grievance ‘because he found a way to smear me as a gay man.’

‘If I were heterosexual, I don’t think that would be an allegation against me,’ he said. ‘I think because I’m gay it suddenly becomes believable.’

Bass also said that Boykin had withheld the details of the coercion grievance and been evasive when faced with Bass’s questions about it. Boykin did not respond to other e-mails, Bass said, but eventually told him what time the meeting was.

Boykin said he wasn’t being evasive, but merely a busy student.

‘I sent the e-mail late Monday night. Tuesday he e-mailed me back but, I didn’t have my computer with me,’ Boykin said. ‘The Elections Committee chair is a volunteer position. And when school work becomes more important than extracurricular activities I’ll answer his e-mails upon receipt.’

He added that he was deliberately vague about the cause of the grievance out of concern for Belsky’s privacy. ‘I didn’t know how far I was going to go and how much I could say,’ he said.

But Bass finally did find out about the grievance when he was hit with it as he entered the hearing a few minutes late.

By the end of the meeting, he had been pulled off the ballot entirely by the Elections Committee ruling ‘ a decision which was overturned by the Judicial Board on Wednesday night. The two candidates will once again compete for the student vote, something that Bass sees as unacceptable, saying that it would disregard the mandate students had given him with his nearly 300-point lead over Belsky.

‘This is the most ridiculous thing ever. Students voted clearly,’ he said.

Belsky said that he would likely decide by today if he was going to press criminal charges.