The Student Association (SA) Judicial Board denied Epiphany Munoz’s grievance against the Planning, Research and Elections (PRE) Committee Tuesday night.

In the revote for vice president for multicultural affairs (VPMA), Munoz and student witnesses Jessica Dunn, Samiyah Small, Toivo Asheeke and Jamella Washington argued that votes misspelling Ruslan Klafehn’s name should not have been counted toward the minimum 40 percent necessary to win the election.

PRE and the SA decided to count the 65 misspelled votes for Klafehn after re-evaluating their original interpretation of SA constitutional guidelines. Even though she was not planning to run again and instead to focus on her executive board position for X-Fact’r step team, Munoz said that her intent was to highlight that the rules were unclear.

“The concept of common sense was brought up a lot, and my concept of common sense can be very different than yours, so it makes everything very fuzzy and unclear,” said Munoz, a sophomore double-majoring in sociology and Africana studies. “I wanted to bring that to the attention of the board. It’s not personal to Ruslan; it’s really just about their decision.”

Representing Student Congress at the hearing were Nicholas Ferrera, a member of Student Congress and a sophomore majoring in economics; Julie Kline, PRE committee chair and a sophomore double-majoring in human development and English; and JP Fauchet, Student Congress speaker and a junior majoring in computer science.

The SA defense said it created a clear standard for judging votes, and decided to count those that were misspelled by one letter. After going through the 2,005 ballots cast, the SA approved 65 more votes for Klafehn, a freshman majoring in political science.

“It’s very long stretch of the imagination to say that people who spelt all of his name right, except for one ‘E’ somewhere, were really trying to vote for Epiphany,” Ferrara said. “That was not their intention.”

In addition, during the hearing Fauchet addressed a clause in the Student Association Management Policies and Procedures Handbook that stated “Write‐in votes will be counted only if those votes are cast for registered undergraduate students.” According to him, since many students wrote in for joke candidates, removing invalid ballots would decrease the total number of votes cast. Recalculating with this new total, Ruslan would still have won the revote even before the recount.

“Votes like Harvey Stenger and Baxter don’t count,” he said. “So if you take those votes out of the vote total Ruslan has over 40 percent of the total votes with his correctly spelled name to win the election.”

The window for grievances regarding the 2015-2016 VPMA election and revote has closed, and Klafehn will assume the position in fall 2015.