Hey Bill,

Here is our new case, with the Senate's official
statement below for reference.

Dylan

 Background:

On May 10, 2004 the ASSU Undergraduate Senate voted to not certify the
results of the Executive portion of the April 7-8 General Election,
based on the reasons given in the attached document. At its meeting on
May 16, the Constitutional Council ruled against a case on this matter
based on a technicality in the phrasing of the filing, but chose not to
rule on the underlying issues.


 Argument:

 We claim that the ASSU Undergraduate Senate's decision not to certify
violated Article I, Section III, clause II, which states:

"The Association shall enact no legislation respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the
freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the Association for a redress of grievances."

The Class Presidents are registered Voluntary Student Organizations (VSOs) 
comprising students who are members of the Association.  They are
governed by a variety of regulations coming from the Office of Student
Activities, which also provides them with funding and special access to
university resources (in particular, the e-mail lists in question).

This arrangement would be unconstitutional if the Class Presidents were
ASSU officials, since it would violate Article I, Section 6 of the ASSU
Constitution, which states that "The finances of the Association shall
be independent of the University, except as defined within this
Constitution," and also that "All power of Stanford University within
the Association is circumscribed by this Constitution.  Any action by
Stanford University within the Association not specifically enumerated
within this Constitution is a violation of the independence of the
Association."

Fortunately, this is not the case.  The positions are mentioned nowhere
in the ASSU Constitution or the ASSU By-Laws (Joint or Undergraduate),
and the only reference to them in the Policies is in regard to the
procedure for electing them.  Although the ASSU provides the service of
conducting the election of the Class Presidents, they are not ASSU
officials, and the ASSU exercises no oversight over them.

Indeed, the majority statement acknowledges that it is the University
which has oversight over the Class Presidents and the lists in
question--their stated justification depends on the existence of a
University regulation regarding that list, despite the previous
Constitutional Council ruling prohibiting the ASSU for enforcing
restrictions on free speech made by the University.

Given this, the ASSU cannot regulate their speech, nor their use of
resources not belonging to the ASSU, any more than it could regulate the
the student staff of a community center's use of that space.

In addition, the rule the ASSU attempts to create is a retroactive one.
By definition, such a rule can never be narrowly defined: given a
particular action, any criterion can be invented, carefully tailored to
the specific situation.  However in the future, a similar "narrowly
defined" rule could be created for an entirely different circumstance.
If the ASSU can prohibit (or assess a huge penalty in retribution for) a
wide and unknowable range of actions, speech will be suppressed because
students will be afraid to exercise their rights.

This applies even to speech which is likely protected: if the ASSU can
punish speech despite the lack of any preexisting rule against it,
student leaders (many of whom are not familiar with the ASSU
Constitution) could plausibly fear that a future ASSU would overturn an
election if, for example, their group endorsed a candidate at an event
which received Special or General Fee funding.  This is particularly
true given the ASSU's propensity for implying that its campaign rules
prohibit more than they actually do (consider, for example, the strong
implication in the current CPC that campaigning is prohibited while
voting takes place).




Majority Opinion
Article 5. Section 9. Subsection B. Clause 1 of the Joint By-Laws of the
Associated Students of Stanford University ... Grounds for not
certifying an election shall include, but need not be limited to,
deviations that were avoidable and could possibly have affected the
outcome of any issue in the election

We (the majority of Sixth Undergraduate Senate) found that, given the
stipulations made in the Joint By-Laws of the ASSU, there were
sufficient grounds for not certifying the April 2004 ASSU Executive
Elections. Specifically, we found that an abuse of power led to an
avoidable and influential deviation.  The majority defines abuse of
power as the misuse of granted privileges.  In this case, a candidate
who was a member of the Senior Class Presidents actively encouraged, and
successfully persuaded, the Senior Class and Junior Class presiding
bodies to misuse their University-granted power to post messages to
class-wide email lists.  The University mandates that all students of a
given class receive emails from these lists, with the intent that the
lists only be used to disseminate information about class related
activities.  As a Senior Class president, the candidate in question was
aware of this policy, as were the rest of the Senior and Junior Class
presidents.  Access to such lists allows presidents to communicate with
roughly half of the undergraduate population.  As a result of the email
lists' potential for influence, those vested with control of the lists
are given the responsibility to use them only in a prescribed manner. We
deem that the use of these granted abilities resulted in a deviation
from standard election procedure that was not protected by the
constitution.