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Students interested in running for president or vice president of student government have an extra week to file their nomination papers thanks to an election-law snafu. During Tuesday’s meeting, senators questioned the handling of the rectification process by senator William Pomerleau. The result moves the filing deadline to Tuesday, Nov. 21.
It is required that the public be told of the nomination papers on both the week before and week of their availability. The week prior to elections, president Adam Kirkland took it upon himself to run an advertisement in The Maine Campus. For the week that the papers were available, no ads ran. Senator Gabrielle Berube, acting as head of the Fair Elections Practices Committee, noted the rule had been inadvertently violated in the transition of power. The former chair, Kelly Pelletier, stepped down for personal reasons.
“This makes it an insular election,” Berube said, “Student government elections should not be open only to members of the student senate.”
Berube asked the senate to extend the filing period by a week, in order to run an ad and correct the oversight. However, complications arose when senator William Pomerleau, acting president pro-tempore because of vice president Aaron Sterling’s absence, declared that it was out of order. GSS does not have the authority to change FEPC guidelines through a resolution.
This drew vocal opposition from president Kirkland and vice president of student organizations, Teagan Thibodeau. Thibodeau said that as a nominee for vice president, Pomerleau should step down from the pro-tempore position. Pomerleau disputed that it was a conflict of interest. Kirkland said that Pomerleau’s ruling was a personal interpretation, and that senate business could theoretically proceed had Pomerleau interpreted it differently.
This led at least five senators to motion for Pomerleau to step down from the chair, which Pomerleau also declared out of order. Pomerleau argued that his call was not interpretive but rooted in the standing rules, and that if anyone had allowed the resolution to pass, vice president Aaron Sterling would be obligated to overturn it later.
The senate went into recess. Called back to order, presidential nominee and current vice president of student entertainment Derek Mitchell filed a complaint against the FEPC as a technicality to allow GSS to serve in an oversight capacity to the FEPC. This gives GSS the authority to rule as a judicial body on the merits of the complaint and to determine how to correct it.
Those who were not members of the senate were asked to leave the room, which was a point of personal privilege requested by senator Matt Cox. This appears to be a violation of its standing rules. FEPC guidelines state that if GSS serves as the judicial body for a complaint against the FEPC, then it must do so “under the same procedures” as required by the FEPC. In removing all non-senate members from the hearing, GSS violated the standing rule of the FEPC that “voting on complaints of alleged rules violation will be done by a roll call vote at an open meeting.” Instead, it was held in a closed session, which is reserved for deliberations on the verdict, not the hearing of the complaint. Had the senate operated under its own rules, under Rule 10, Section Five, the judicial hearings would have had to take place one week after the trial resolution was passed.
“The trial should have been held in a separate meeting, and [senator] Pomerleau, as a candidate in this election, should have yielded the chair,” president Kirkland said. “The refusal to recuse himself was inappropriate.” Kirkland said he believed an open meeting would ensure the fairness of the election procedure.
Mitchell believed Pomerleau was acting under Parliamentary guidelines with the intent of maintaining the operations of the senate.
Proceedings took roughly 15 to 20 minutes. The final decision was that the FEPC was guilty of violating its own resolutions, and that the nomination papers would be extended until Tuesday, Nov. 24 at noon.
“Based on the discontent of the senate, I would have spent less time saying how we couldn’t do it and more time saying how we could,” senator Sean Rankin said of Pomerleau, whom he is running against for vice president. Rankin added that he was happy with the decision to extend the filing deadline and allow more nominees to join the process. “Competition brings the best out of all candidates,” he said.
“I put my full weight behind everything I did tonight,” Pomerleau said. “I would have ruled the same way if I wasn’t a candidate.” He added that the process allowed the senate to get what it wanted, “and in my eyes it got it legitimately.”
“It’s only fair to run the ads,” Mitchell said, adding, “I think the candidates who will declare have done so already.”
