Editorial: Conflicts of interest should be avoided

Staff Editorial

After a clear and avoidable conflict of interest occurred in this year’s student government election, members should take their election commission’s suggestions seriously and work to avoid this in the future.

Last Wednesday, the commission ruled that election results would stand after a grievance was filed claiming the student government gave an unfair advantage to two candidates by promoting their campaigns on social media.

The commission’s reasoning was that both Maralea Negron, who was running for executive vice president, and Derek Pierce, running for vice president of student affairs, won by more than 200 votes.

The commission also cited the resources needed to run another election and the likelihood that voter turnout would be lower.

But the main reason and the biggest issue that allowed for this conflict to occur was that no election rules existed against this, hence no violation was cited in the grievance.

The commission’s ruling was sensible, as the wide margin of their victories means the potential advantage from the Instagram post would have been minimal.

It is unlikely that anyone on the student government intended to create a conflict; they were probably only trying to promote their members’ activity and the election itself.

Regardless of intent, though, the appearance from the perspective of the student body is that the student government was endorsing those candidates.

The commission’s report indicated that, because the student government is a registered student organization, it was technically allowed to promote candidates like any other RSO.

However, as the organization hosting the election, it was unwise for the student government to imply their support of certain candidates over others. Rather, the organization hosting any election should strive to be as unbiased to the results as possible.

If all candidates did not submit promotional materials, none of them should have been posted directly on the student government’s account.

Instead, the student government could have shared posts from the accounts of the candidates themselves. Language could have been included asking people to vote in the elections but not specifically for any particular candidates.

News organizations often run into this problem on social media when interacting with politicians or others with political affiliations, which is why many journalists’ Twitter accounts will say something like, “retweets do not equal endorsement.”

As social media becomes more prevalent every year, it is important that guidelines are set into place to prevent future conflicts from occurring.

According to an April 7 article in The Daily Eastern News, election commission member Kimberly Cuspa said social media is a fairly gray area, which is why the commission would continue to work on social media election guidelines and get input from the Student Senate.

The senate will have to vote on the new guidelines before next year’s election.

Meanwhile, it is up to the student government to take this situation seriously and not brush it off as though no mistake was made. Members should seek to make the election process as clear as possible for newcomers so that more conflicts can be avoided.

The daily editorial is the majority opinion of the editorial board of The Daily Eastern News