Undergraduate students will not be able to vote online in the upcoming Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) referendum because of legal considerations.
CUSA council voted in favour of a number of changes to the referendum on March 12. These changes included altering the wording of a question to ask students whether they wanted to stop funding some campus groups, including the Ontario Public Interest Research Group’s (OPIRG) Carleton branch.
CUSA vice-president (finance) Michael De Luca put forward the motion to change the wording of the question about OPIRG-Carleton’s levy.
He said CUSA reached a new agreement with OPIRG to prevent them from taking legal action.
OPIRG-Carleton is a non-profit, student-run group that also funds Cinema Politica, the Leveller, and Students Against Israeli Apartheid. Students pay a levy of $6.84 every year to the group.
Students who have an issue with OPIRG-Carleton can opt out of the levy.
To accommodate the campaigning period for the new referendum question, the voting period was pushed back two weeks to April 3 and 4.
Elections will no longer be held online due to the change in polling dates because the Carleton Office of Institutional Research and Planning— who organize online polling— are not able to accommodate online elections at that time, chief electoral officer Sunny Cohen said.
An online election would have cost $5,000, while a paper ballot election will cost about $20,000, De Luca said.
But De Luca said the benefits of avoiding litigation exceed the cost of a paper ballot election.
“We’re looking at a possible $20,000 election, but I justify it this way: the risks of liabilities we’re mitigating by going ahead with this arrangement, so the potential for litigation, those savings justify the costs of paper ballots,” De Luca said.
Nineteen councillors voted in favour of the motion, four were against it, and one abstained.
Public affairs councillor Sean White said going forward with this motion would go against CUSA constitution.
“We can’t make changes if they go in front of council,” he said. “It would be setting a bad precedent for next year.”
He said he voted against the motion because it would be setting aside CUSA bylaws because of time restraints.
OPIRG-Carleton also had issue with the electoral board and constitutional board and made changes to the boards that oversee the referendum process.
A few of the board members had an “appearance of bias,” De Luca said. “Some of the people were friends with the opt out OPIRG Facebook group,”
The new referendum question now reads: “OPIRG-Carleton (the Ontario Public Interest Research Group – Carleton) is a student-run, non-profit organization operating on the Carleton University campus which receives a levy from Carleton students. The levy is refundable during one five day period annually for every student. Are you in favour of eliminating the OPIRG-Carleton levy of $3.42 per term from every full-time undergraduate student and $1.37 per credit, per term for part-time undergraduate students?”
