The Tufts Community Union (TCU) political system, complete with its executive, legislative and judicial branches, has always existed as a microcosm of the system in place in America today. While only present on a smaller scale, the political ideals, ambitions and alliances formed in our university's student government are very real, and for the most part, we at the Daily have enjoyed watching the political process in action.
This week, as we witnessed the failure of the political process with the botched election of one of those three branches, we have unfortunately learned to take the political bad with the good. Not even the TCU Senate is immune from the petty games that go on behind the scenes in politics — anyone at any level, even a freshman TCU Senate candidate, is always looking for that extra edge.
In a way, it's not surprising that the glitch in the Votenet interface used by the Elections Commission (ECOM) led to the fiasco that it did. The 13 first-year students running for the Senate's seven available seats are human; it's in their nature to look for an opportunity to get ahead, and in this case, several of them thought they found one. Naturally, they capitalized on it.
But while their actions might be understandable, they certainly are not excusable. The senators who notified their supporters of the glitch in an attempt to exploit it are certainly at fault. The students who first discovered the problem, whoever they may be, were faced with two options: either take the moral high road and report the problem to ECOM immediately or take advantage of it for their own political gain. Unfortunately, some candidates did both.
We've seen politicians face these decisions throughout our lives, and countless times, they've made the wrong decisions. Now, we've seen it on our own campus. We would have hoped for all Tufts students to have chosen what was right over what benefited them the most. But again, life on the Hill mirrored politics outside the college bubble.
The students who encouraged the corruption of Wednesday's election — most notably Senator Elliott McCarthy, who explicitly told his supporters to "vote a second time, with all the previous ballots still counting" — deserve a good portion of the blame for the voiding of the voting results. But ECOM, the overseers of Wednesday's election, should have seen this coming.
The election's governing body had a responsibility in this situation to address the problem immediately, notify the candidates and reassure the voters that their voices would all be heard equally. This didn't happen. Instead, as Senator Manuel Guzman told the Daily yesterday, the candidates were given secondhand information.
Because the members of ECOM did not meet until after midnight on Thursday to decide to void the election results, they shoulder a large portion of the blame for the way the day played out. Regardless of whether those who voted twice were only counted once, the hint of even a possibility of corruption indicates that ECOM did not do its job. The commission is in place to run honest and fair elections, and its members did not live up to their one responsibility.
We at the Daily are disappointed to have seen the negative consequences of the political process running its course at Tufts. While we would have hoped for students to exhibit the judgment not to exploit loopholes and for ECOM to deal with legitimate issues in a timely and effective manner, this was not the case. The fact that this incident spun out of control is a sad commentary on the electoral process at Tufts.
