UNC RHA presidential candidate files lawsuit against UNC Board of Elections

On Feb. 14, the UNC Board of Elections released a statement that candidate Addison Truzy was the certified winner of the Residence Hall Association’s presidential election. Five days later, on Feb. 19 — without directly informing her — the BOE issued revised results, declaring another candidate the winner.

Truzy has filed a lawsuit with the UNC Student Supreme Court alleging that the BOE failed to certify the election results in a timely manner and did not properly announce changes to the voting schedule.

UNC’s early voting period, during which students were instructed to submit in-person ballots in a Student Union drop box, was scheduled for Feb. 8 to Feb. 10. General voting was scheduled for Feb. 11 through Feb. 12 online, but was extended to Feb. 14 due to concerns over the integrity of the in-person ballot box. 

“What had happened was the Board of Elections had failed to actually produce secure in-person ballots as they are constitutionally required to do, so they were sued successfully before the Student Supreme Court and forced to extend their deadline by two days,” Jasmine Werry, Truzy’s council, said. 

The BOE was later held in contempt by the Student Supreme Court for missing its certification deadline.

Elias North, chair of the BOE, wrote an email to The DTH confirming there was a typo in the BOE’s Feb. 15 release, which mistakenly labeled the preliminary results as certified. This led to the BOE initially declaring Truzy the winner, but after recounting the votes, they revised the results.

North said in an interview with The DTH that the cause for the change of results was due to a software error in a new vote-counting system. 

“The only reason that a different method was employed at the initial tabulation was because it was Valentine’s Day, and the other member of the board very clearly did not want to be there very long,” North said in a UNC Supreme Court hearing. 

North said a discrepancy emerged when the software tallied over 1,400 votes despite there being only 1,270 ballots cast. After manually recounting, the BOE revised the results and released the final certification on Feb. 19, declaring Audra Farrar the official winner by eight votes.

“I deeply regret that we published those erroneous results, and I'm very sorry for the sorrow that this caused,” North said.

In her initial filing, Truzy proposed two resolutions. The first was to maintain the original results published on Feb. 14, while the alternative she seeks is to hold a complete re-election of the RHA position. Truzy said that the feasibility of the re-election decreases with time, as elected RHA officials are scheduled to assume their positions in April. 

A re-election would require all Student Government races to be rerun — a “titanic undertaking” the University lacks time to execute, North said. He also said the BOE maintains the current results are valid and that a redo would be a “tremendous miscarriage of justice.”

Outside of the litigation, Truzy said she was deeply disheartened and humiliated by the lack of care shown to others through the election cycle.

“I think the greatest impact was just in my personal daily life, and I don't think that gets acknowledged, or is even able to be articulated, within the court documents,” she said. 

Legal proceedings are ongoing, with no verdict yet from the Student Supreme Court. Nathaniel Shue, chief justice of the Student Supreme Court, said previous events have left the BOE facing unprecedented demands and fewer members to meet those responsibilities, exacerbating systemic flaws within the Board.

“I think that if Student Government doesn’t put some real effort into finding institutional solutions to these problems, we are going to continue to see lawsuits over and over and over about elections that result in a lot of chaos,” Shue said.

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