On Home Stretch: Batons, Lights

The Petersen-Sundquist campaign faced budget-hampering penalties yesterday after committing campaign infractions involving postering, e-mailing, and financial reporting.

But all of this seemed commonplace compared to accusations leveled against the rival Hadfield-Goldenberg campaign earlier this week for a showier, more high-flown gaffe—baton twirling.

“Somebody complained that a campaign was using a baton–a twirler’s baton–in front of the Science Center, and they were not reporting the baton as a campaign expense,” said Joshua G. Allen ’09, who chairs the Election Commission (EC), the six-person body that oversees Undergraduate Council (UC) elections.

Both the EC and Allen—who has sent daily updates on campaign violations through the UC open list since voting began this week—have had to separate viable complaints about campaign procedure from less substantial ones.

The baton incident fell into the latter category, and, according to Allen, it wasn’t the only one.

“Somebody complained that a poster was covering another poster when it was covering about 1 percent of the poster. That’s clearly just a waste of our time, not a violation,” he said yesterday.

While Allen stressed that these sort of reports were rare, e-mails sent by the Election Commission to the UC open list have asked that students “quit sending in frivolous complaints.”

Part of the problem likely lies in the specificity of the transgressions that the EC addresses. The Commission’s official rules stipulate regulations such as a ban on any campaigning “within thirty-five feet of the entrance to a classroom” and a provision that prohibits the placement of campaign literature in computer labs. A two-page supplement devoted entirely to postering mandates that signs placed on the “free-standing” kiosks in the Yard be no larger than 8.5 by 11 inches—and, for the tricksters considering three-dimensional construction, that there be a “maximum total surface area” of 93.5 square inches. Different dimensional requirements are dictated for other sites, further increasing the complexity of the rules.

Still, the Commission does not concern itself with every last nuance, Allen stressing that it is the “spirit of the rules, not the rules themselves” that count. The Hwang-Wong campaign used Christmas lights to spell out their ticket’s name on Thayer Hall late last night. Tim R. Hwang ’08 said there was no “better way to celebrate the revolutionary movement than by having huge lights on a freshman dorm.”

Allen did not nitpick last night and indicated that he had not known about the lights until informed by The Crimson.

“The Election Commission congratulates [Hwang-Wong] on their creativity,” he said.

In fact, the Commission relies primarily on outside reports to detect infractions rather than actively seeking them out.

“We’re trying to cut down on the number of patrols we’re doing because we decided that if we kept looking in certain places over and over and maybe not looking in others, there was a sort of bias there,” Allen said. “So now we’re trying to consider mainly infractions that come in as complaints.”

But the dependence on these outside reports could create the potential for finger-pointing among campaigns, some of which center on weightier—and possibly more damaging—matters than batons.

“If there is a campaign that is desperate for an attack...it doesn’t surprise me that out of desperation, that campaign would make [an] accusation out of the blue,” said Matthew R. Greenfield ’08, who is responsible for filing Petersen-Sundquist campaign reports with the EC.

While she herself was the subject of a complaint, baton-twirler Lindsay M. Liles ’10 seemed a bit less concerned with inter-campaign wrangling.

“I was happy to twirl regardless,” she said. “I wanted to try to keep up my skills for next year.”

And if the EC had in fact ruled that it was necessary for the cost of the baton to be reported in campaign finance reports, she said she would have been ready with the necessary information.

“My batons are about $25 apiece, and that’s actually not bad,” she said. “They’re real hardy so they don’t break very often.”