TO THE EDITOR:
Watching the spat between the Board of Elections and The Daily Tar Heel from afar, I'm not exactly sure what's going on or whose side I'm on. But an editorial Friday, (Court should not legislate"" Jan. 23) prompted me to write my first letter to the editor in some time.
How can the editorial board claim that the BOE has no power to interpret Title VI of the Student Code? How can any administrative panel enforce the law if it cannot interpret what the law means in the first place?
This power of any executive official at any level of government has been enforced by common sense, the courts, and, in this case, the Student Supreme Court time and again.
In fact, when Tyler Younts and I wrote the law in 2006 that created the regulations on candidate Facebook groups, it was in response to the Board's interpretation that existing law prohibited Facebook groups altogether because they were then considered Web sites"" by Code definition" and all Web sites were required to exist on UNC's server.
The board's interpretation defied previous tradition which allowed Facebook groups but they were correct in their reading of the law. The BOE sued us charging that we were exercising interpretive power — their sole jurisdiction — but we never claimed they were wrong so we wrote legislation which they would have to interpret as allowing Facebook groups to exist.
The Supreme Court upheld Congress' right to legislate and the Board of Elections' right to interpret what we pass into law.
They should always propose election law changes to Congress far in advance of elections but the suggestion that they cannot interpret the law already in effect in order to regulate elections would prohibit them from doing what every human being does when he reads a written word — interpret its meaning.
Dustin Ingalls
UNC ‘07
Former Student Congress Speaker Pro Tempore