Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) elections are just ramping up, but the electoral rules made to ensure impartiality and accountability were broken weeks ago when CUSA set up the elections process.
The Chief Elections Officer (CEO) and Deputy Electoral Officers (DEOs) are impartial, independent staff who make sure the elections are run well.
The Writ of Election sets out all of the election dates and timelines. These dates are supposed to be set by the CEO and DEOs without input from the CUSA executive and office staff, since knowing election dates gives anyone who may run for re-election an unfair advantage over any challengers.
The integrity of an election lies in its independence from any formal elected office, but dates and time of the CUSA election were set before the CEO was hired.
The CEO and DEOs are responsible for writing and presenting the Writ of Election, but they were hired after this document’s creation and distribution. The writ’s dates were decided by the CEO before being ratified by council, violating CUSA’s electoral code.
CUSA council, the governing body of the entire association, was not directly informed that the hiring of the CEO and DEOs was open. Under CUSA’s hiring policy, written notice for any paid position opening is required to be given to Council.
Though the CEO and DEO job postings were put on the CUSA website, the website was sporadically offline over November and December. While public announcements were made for the CEO and DEO openings on CUSA’s social media feeds, many students may not have seen this posting.
The group, established to search for the CEO and DEOs, violated CUSA’s policies for hiring new staff.
The composition of any CUSA hiring board is supposed to be executives, a councillor selected at random, and community members at large. The board for the CEO composed of president Folarin Odunayo and two people he hand-selected.
The hiring board is supposed to have balanced perspectives to ensure accountability and transparency in the hiring process. Hand-picking who sits on the board means that everyone could have the same perspective on what makes a good elections officer.
Once the CEO and DEOs were hired, CUSA violated its electoral code again. Under section 2.2 of the code, at least three candidates for each position must be considered and voted on by CUSA council, but the CUSA hiring board only presented its top choices.
CUSA has more students involved to make sure elections are fair and transparent through the electoral review board. The electoral review board oversees elections complaints and appeals throughout the election. Any undergraduate student can be elected to this board.
These students are supposed to be independent from any candidate running in the election and able to exercise sound judgement to whether the electoral code is being followed or not.
Openings for this board were only distributed to councillors 48 hours before the students needed to be selected and were not made public anywhere by CUSA.
Unless a student knows a councillor or executive, there is little chance they could have known about the openings. All of the people who were selected to be on the review board were nominated by Odunayo. Interpret that however you want.
You might not care about CUSA or elections on the whole, but if CUSA can’t even set up a proper election how can we expect our association to do anything at all for students? CUSA needs to change. That first change needs to be following its own bylaws and policies.
