Laying Down the Law

The candidates for Undergraduate Council president and vice president listened last Monday night as Election Commission (EC) chair Michael L. Taylor ’08 read aloud eight single-spaced pages of rules governing this year’s campaign.

Tasked with perhaps the most thankless jobs of election season, the members of the commission say that their work is dirty, but that someone has to do it. The epic read-aloud is emblematic of the EC’s role.

“A lot of times candidates will say that they read the rules and won’t necessarily have read them,” says Taylor, a government concentrator who became attracted to the EC because of his interest in politics.

But making sure that every candidate has read—and heard—the campaign rules is just one of many duties the EC fulfills. From wielding the power to disqualify candidates to closing loopholes blown open by crafty student pols of years past, the EC’s authority means that it often makes nearly as many headlines as the race that it is charged with moderating.

ENFORCING THE RULES

The EC was formed in 1994 out of concerns that allowing the UC to govern its own race presented a conflict of interest.

Composed of three UC and three non-UC members plus a chair, the EC is charged with publicizing the elections, monitoring campaign spending, and—most prominently—making and enforcing the rules that campaigns must follow.

Given its wide latitude to affect the outcome of the race, the EC has become as vulnerable to criticism as the candidates themselves.

When last year’s chair, Josh G. Allen ’09, severely limited e-mail campaigning, for example, he faced a near mutiny from incensed candidates and campaign workers.

“The rule was construed to be anti-free speech to some extent or another,” Allen says.

Taylor and the commission ultimately voted to lift the ban on e-mail campaigning this year, but the practice is now tightly regulated: E-mails must include a disclaimer identifying the campaign, similar to how federal candidates approve messages at the end of television advertisements.

AN ADVERSARIAL ARENA

While making sure that every single poster put up by every single campaign follows the letter of the law may seem like a daunting task for a seven-person commission, chairs say that the campaigns usually enforce the rules themselves by alerting the EC to their competitors’ violations.

“They would have their campaign staffers go around campus with video cameras so they could get video evidence of campaign violations occurring,” says Jonathan D. Einkauf ’06, who chaired the EC in 2004.

According to Taylor, the commission will often receive notification of a violation “within minutes” of its occurrence.

“The campaigns are obsessive about it, and they should be,” he says.

But the line between diligence and fanaticism is a thin one, according to former EC chairs.

Sujit M. Raman ’00, who chaired the EC in 1997, cites complaints over people ripping down signs or going $10 over budget as representative of a “general kind of self-importance.”

SHORTENING THE LEASH

Perhaps the most compelling challenge facing the EC is the perpetually nebulous task of closing loopholes that campaigns discovered and exploited in previous years.

Taylor says that it is easy to know which campaigns read the rules fully “because they’re usually the ones that figure out really creative ways to get around them.”

The practice of taking advantage of loopholes is not new by any means, and Taylor is certainly not the first chair to notice it.

“They’ll always come up with a very creative, innovative way to bend the rule[s],” Einkauf says.

And the arms race—with campaigns rushing to capitalize on loopholes and the EC eager to close them—may be what leads some to accuse the commission of being overly nitpicky in administering the rules.

“I think that some of what it is forced to do may seem silly because it involves what appears to be very minor issues,” Einkauf says. “[But] it’s important to a large number of people, so there needs to be this group that takes the job seriously.”

MOANING AND GROANING

Over the years, the complaints the EC has had to contend with have been memorable.

In the 2004 election, Facebook creator Mark E. Zuckerberg, formerly of the Class of 2006, drew an outcry when he endorsed a candidate on the main page of the social networking site, which was confined to only a few schools at the time.

The same year, presidential candidate Aaron S. Byrd ’05 irked opponents by trying to exclude a large bird costume—which he was using as a play on his name—from his official campaign budget.

And in 2005, an uninvolved student tried, unsuccessfully, to set up a service by which students could sell their votes to campaigns.

Policing all these antics is a tall task, but some long-term benefit has apparently come out of it: according to Taylor, at least one former EC member has gone on to work for the Federal Election Commission.

—Aditi Banga contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Victoria B. Kabak can be reached at vkabak@fas.harvard.edu.