The Change slate have publicly stated they are not accepting the result of the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) election due to allegations that the Team Change email account was hacked.
“An unknown IP address accessed the password-protected email account. The password to this account was changed by the IP address and the recovery phone was removed,” Change stated in a post on their Facebook page.
The post alleged the hack came from the CUSA offices, and added that an investigation was filed to the Ottawa police on the morning of Feb. 2.
Mark Brown, Information Technology Services (ITS) service desk supervisor at Carleton, said ITS was able to trace the location of the IP address to the fourth floor of the University Centre.
“[The IP address came] from one of the student subnets, that [is] basically a public area,” Brown said, and added that anyone could have plugged in to the address.
Brown said the IP address was disconnected from the internet by the time they tracked it.
Anthony Galipeau, Change’s co-campaign manager, said an investigation is currently underway regarding the hack.
“We’re in contact with campus services, we’re in contact with ITS and right now we just have strong suspicions to believe that this wasn’t just a coincidental out of nowhere sort of thing,” Galipeau said.
Despite Change stating that ITS is currently investigating the hack, Brown said that there isn’t much Carleton can do because the account hacked is a Gmail, and therefore a private account.
“We don’t have any real way of doing anything with a Gmail account. It’s your private account, it’s hard for us to do anything,” he said.
Brown said Frano Cavar, chief electoral officer of the CUSA election, first mentioned the hack to him on the morning of Feb. 1, when he was signing out laptops on the first day of voting.
Since then Brown said nobody has been in contact with him about the hack.
Cavar declined to comment on the hack or any possible electoral violation in regards to it.
One Carleton, led by presidential candidate Zameer Masjedee, won all six executive positions in the 2017 election. Change was the only other full slate running.
David Andrews, One Carleton campaign manager and current CUSA vice-president (finance), said he did not know anything about the hack and declined to comment further on the matter.
“The results speak for themselves, it’s pretty obvious, I don’t think anyone is going to argue that,” Andrews said.
Change’s Facebook post stated the slate will not accept the result of the election “until such time as the elections committee, campus safety, Carleton IT services, the ombudsman, and the Ottawa police have completed investigations against the One Carleton slate and current CUSA executive members and staff.”
A spokesperson for the Ottawa police said they could not confirm or deny whether the police service was actively investigating the hack of the email account.
— with files from Naomi Librach
— File photo
