After countless hours of work by the Student Labor Action Coalition to successfully\ pass a living wage referendum, the Student Judiciary nullified SLAC's victory in one night because 436 votes were not counted due to an error in the online voting system.
The contention comes because 436 votes were not enough to change the ultimate result of the referenda—the living wage referendum passed by 2,108 votes and the Union renovation plan failed by 695 votes.
Those who disagreed with the results, specifically Associated Students of Madison Chair Eric Varney and the Wisconsin Union Directorate carefully cited the democratic right to vote as the reason for agreement with Student Judiciary's ruling.
Nonetheless, they must have been happy with the nullification because they also disagreed with the results. Varney, who formally challenged the results, said, ""I wasn't happy with the results. That sounds Machiavellic."" We are disappointed that Varney's main motive in pursuing the invalidation of referenda election results might have been disagreement with the results.
Regardless of one's side on the referenda, it was appropriate to nullify the election results. At this point, after two failed ASM elections, it is simply not worth it to further allow the degradation of ASM by allowing an undemocratic election to stand. If an election in which 436 votes remain uncounted stands as valid, every further ASM election will be scrutinized even further as possibly undemocratic.
In addition, it would set a terrible precedent for ASM to allow an election with hundreds of miscounted votes to stand. In the future, if the results remained valid, ASM could look back on the spring 2006 election to rationalize more uncounted votes and more undemocratic elections.
We are glad to see ASM has postponed the election until next fall instead of trying to squeeze it in this semester with either a problem ridden online-voting system or paper ballots. Next semester will give the campus a chance for a clean slate and hopefully another record-setting turnout.
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