05/02/2018
Dear UCR Community,
Several students have expressed their concerns that “ballots went missing” or that something happened during the collection of the ballots that lowered the turnout in this year’s ASUCR election. The ASUCR Judicial Council would like to ensure the student body that this year’s election was conducted and handled with the utmost care.
It was established before the election that members of the Judicial Branch would supervise the transportation of the ballots. During election week, at least three members of the Judicial Branch helped transport the ballots from the polling stations to the office of Laurie Sinclair, the ASUCR Executive Director, and to organize the ballots into stacks by hand.
After organizing the ballots into stacks, the Executive Director was escorted by the Elections Director and three members of Judicial Branch as she carried the ballots to a safe outside of the ASUCR office. Only the Executive Director and one other professional staff member from ASUCR have the key to the safe. We locked the ballots in the safe and repeated this process everyday of elections week.
The only time ballots were taken out to the safe was Sunday when the ballots were counted. There is video proof that the ballots were not mishandled when they were removed from the safe for counting. Members of the Judicial Branch, the Executive Director, the Elections Director, and members of the Elections Committee all helped count the ballots by scanner and by hand. At no point were any ballots lost, misplaced, tampered with or mishandled. At the end of the count, 2,818 ballots were collected.
This year’s election did not meet 20% turnout, but this was not because of a lack of care surrounding the collection of the ballots. At the end of the day, not enough students came out to the polling stations to vote.Hopefully next year, this will not be the case.
If you have any further questions surrounding the role of the Judicial Council during the ASUCR Elections or about how the ballots were handled, please email [email protected].
-Chief Justice Jo Gbujama