Several Student Association campaigns remain under investigation across multiple committees more than a week after the elections ended. The investigations come after a contentious election night that resulted in Syracuse University students accusing SA of election rigging and bias.

Mackenzie Mertikas was elected SA president along with running mate Sameeha Saied just after midnight on Friday, April 12. Junior Stacy Omosa was also elected as comptroller. Investigations are ongoing in the Board of Elections and Membership, the Judicial Review Board and the Administrative Operations Committee, said Academic Affairs Committee Chair Ryan Golden, who ran for SA president against Mertikas and junior Jalen Nash.

Sophia Faram, SA’s elections and membership chair, previously said she could not name the specific campaigns in question because the investigations are ongoing. BEM will release a report detailing the investigation in the near future, Faram said last week. She also said there are “no serious allegations” detailed in BEM’s report.

Golden said on Sunday that one of the BEM investigations stems from an email he sent to Parliamentarian Drew Jacobson about his lack of communication with presidential candidates. In an emailed statement to The Daily Orange, Jacobson said he would not to disclose his communication with another SU student and that he had no knowledge on what BEM or the JRB are investigating in that sense.

Faram confirmed on Sunday night that Golden’s email was part of a BEM investigation.

Amy Nakamura | Senior Design Editor

Comptroller candidate Eduardo Gomez’s campaign was suspended less than 20 minutes before polling closed for the election in what the BEM described as a “serious infraction of SA bylaws.” Several people then left comments on SA’s Instagram page accusing the organization of rigging the election. Omosa had 99 more votes than Gomez when polls closed, Faram said.

Faram said the BEM received evidence the night before the election about a member of Gomez’s campaign being “crude to a lot of different people and a lot of different organizations.” The BEM had to decide within a day whether to suspend his campaign — a decision that committee members discussed late into election night, Faram said.

“We had evidence, we had interviews with the candidate in question. We went into this making sure that we were doing the right things because it’s such a big decision,” Faram said. “We did not feel comfortable until we had everything that we could come up with a decision about.”

SA’s Public Relations committee was notified of Gomez’s campaign suspension about 15 minutes before midnight, when polls closed. Torre Payton-Jackson, SA’s public relations co-chair, then posted an statement on SA’s Instagram announcing Gomez’s suspension. The post was deleted minutes later, eliciting a wave of comments accusing SA, and Payton-Jackson specifically, of rigging the election.

“People associate me with the Instagram so much that anything that happens on the Instagram is a reflection on me,” Payton-Jackson said. “It got to a point where people were saying I personally rigged the election.”

After the suspension, an Instagram account posted a video from Payton-Jackson’s personal Instagram story in which she expressed frustration about the accusations that she rigged the election, telling people who said she was rigging the election to “go f*ck yourself.” The Instagram page, @syracuseshaderoom, was created around the times polls closed and has since been deleted.

During the April 15 meeting of SA’s Assembly, Payton-Jackson said she received death threats after she posted and deleted the announcement about Gomez’s campaign. In an interview last week, Payton-Jackson said she had to contact the Department of Public Safety because of threats she received.

SA’s BEM committee worked directly with SU’s Information Technology Services throughout the campaign to check voter IP addresses and to ensure there weren’t multiple ballots coming from the same devices, Faram said. The only devices where multiple ballots were submitted are public computers that multiple students could access, Faram said. ITS gave SA the election results on a Microsoft Excel sheet directly from MySlice, in which students filled their ballots.

Presidential candidate Jalen Nash, who came in second by 21 votes, said other campaigns had advantages over his and Gomez’s campaigns. Other campaigns used slander and did not get publicly called out in the same manner as Gomez’s campaign, Nash said. He added that there was a “clear bias” from the BEM committee toward certain campaigns, and that some campaigns had clear advantages over others.

“The only reason Eddy (Gomez) got the brunt of it was because Eddy’s not friends with the people in SA. The other people who were running were friends with people in SA,” Nash said. “I genuinely feel like they gave their friends a pass.”

Still, he said Mertikas and Saied earned their election victory and did not participate in any slander.

In an interview on Sunday evening, Golden said the BEM findings were “damning” and that he did not think that the BEM investigation into Gomez’s campaign before the polls closed was biased.

“They didn’t suspend Eduardo at the beginning of the campaign. They suspended him literally 20 minutes before voting ended,” Golden said. “It had little to no effect on the outcome of the election.”

Gomez declined to comment on this article, but emailed a statement to The D.O. last Wednesday that he had previously released after his campaign ended. The statement congratulated Mertikas, Saied and Omosa on their victories and said he had “chosen to raise my observations privately to underscore my sincerity and as an opportunity to express my feelings without creating disruption.”

DISCLAIMER: Jalen Nash is an assistant copy editor in The Daily Orange’s features department. He does not work for or interact with the News section nor does he influence its content in his capacity as an assistant copy editor.

Published on April 21, 2019 at 11:31 pm

Contact Gabe: gkstern@syr.edu | @gabestern326