At the Graduate and Professional Student Federation meeting Tuesday, President Dylan Russell said he amended his lawsuit with the UNC Student Supreme Court against the Board of Elections.
“We just submitted a new lawsuit saying that the entire election was void,” Russell said.
The original lawsuit was based on a bill passed by Student Congress prior to the spring general election, in which conflicting referenda regarding the fate of GPSF and student government were on the ballot. Russell initially sued the Board of Elections for incorrectly following the runoff procedure laid out by the bill.
“We based our lawsuit on that logic, if you follow that bill as described, the 'Two for Two' referendum would have won,” GPSF Chief of Staff Marissa Cann said. “We filed our lawsuit based on this. The Board of Elections calculated the election results on their word of the law interpretation of that bill.”
Through the process of filing the lawsuit, Cann said Student Congress revealed that the version of the bill signed into law was not the version passed by Student Congress. The signed version was given to GPSF and the Board of Elections after the election.
“They supposedly changed the language of that bill to say the (runoff) process continues until there are two options left and nothing passes,” Cann said. “Which if that had been the bill that actually would’ve passed — was the bill that we and the Board of Elections had been given — we would’ve not had a lawsuit.”
Because the validity of the bill was questioned, the Student Supreme Court nullified it entirely. Cann said GPSF is now asking the Student Supreme Court to call the referendum portion of the election void.
“If you’re going to claim that this law is null and void and never existed, then the election will have been conducted illegally, so therefore we’re calling for a redo of the election,” Cann said.
GPSF members discussed other possible solutions to gain autonomy, should there not be another election. Ideas included holding a teach-in to raise consciousness of graduate students’ situations or raising the numbers of graduate students in Student Congress.
