SA presidential candidate Egor Evseev has been officially disqualified from the electoral campaign after allegedly trying to campaign by liking pictures on Instagram after the deadline.
Vice president Mackenzie Campbell insists that the Board of Directors was given all the evidence and information before making their decision.
“The votes were then collected and there was a unanimous vote in favour that there was indeed a policy violation,” said Campbell in an e-mail. “Thus the candidate was removed from the elections.”
Although the SA ensures that they followed procedure, Evseev said he feels otherwise after being disqualified in what he said was an unfair decision.
“I am fighting the complaint now because it was made illegally,” said Evseev. “I was disqualified in a quick and undemocratic way.”
Evseev still plans to be on the Board of Directors next year and he hopes that he can propose a policy reform for the election process to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
“I’ve poured my heart and soul into this thing,” said Evseev. “It’s so ridiculous.”
March 30, Evseev was finally granted an audience with the Board of Directors, which followed the next day.
At the meeting, he was able to present his side of things to the entire board before they came to a decision about what would be done.
Evseev’s argument was that the evidence against him wasn’t properly date stamped and that not enough investigation was done.
“I didn’t like any photo’s after deadline,” said Evseev at the meeting.
Although Evseev explained his side of the story, the SA’s decision remained the same.
“How is using your professional account to like photos not campaigning,” said Campbell in the meeting.
Evseev’s disqualification cancelled out the votes of the people who had voted for him.
The SA told the Times that re-casting a vote was impossible due to the configuration of their website.
However it was indeed possible to re-vote and the Times made the SA aware of this on March 26.
Campbell said that he was thankful for being made aware of this fact and that he would talk to marketing so that students could be made aware that they could re-vote.
Although Campbell assured the Times that the message would be passed on to the students, nothing was done and the message was not sent before the election ended.
The question that remains, what would the results of the election have been had students known that they could re-vote?