It’s Friday, April 9, at approximately 1 p.m.

Election Commission Chairman Avery Maron busts through the doors of the Associated Student Government (ASG) office located on the third floor of the Norris University Center. He’s a couple minutes late, somewhat short of breath from running from the elevator to the office door, and he’s beginning to sweat. Maybe it’s because he’s extremely out of shape from sitting in too many ASG Senate meetings; maybe it’s just a common case of T.G.I.F; or maybe, just maybe, it’s because today is the day petitions are due for students running in this year’s ASG election.

It’s the day he’s been waiting for all year.

Maron and his six Election Commission cronies check the take for the day: four candidates for President, two for Academic Vice President, and one each for Executive and Student Services Vice President. The true work of “The Commission” is about to begin.

Maron begins by reviewing the validity of each signature on all four petitions before him, each signed by 200 people. “We spot-check the signatures via ph to find out if the people who signed actually exist,” says Maron, a junior in the School of Speech.
As he’s reviewing one petition for the presidency, checking each name on ph, he gets the sense that “something fishy” is going on.

“In this particular case, the candidate had 203 signatures,” Maron says. “We found that three of those signed were graduate students, and one of the signers could not be found.”

“His name was Micah Fridman.”

An intensive search operation was immediately put into action to ascertain the true identity of one Micah Fridman. “We checked ph and tried to find out through word of mouth if this person actually existed,” Maron says. After hours of searching, the baffled Commission immediately summoned a hearing with the candidate to find out the truth behind this Mr. Fridman character. Who was he? And why was he signing a petition for the ASG Presidency? Needless to say, the mystery signer was never found, and in the end, a 15-point penalty was recommended and enforced upon the offending candidate. Along with a swift kick in the ass.

Such is the work of “The Commission.”

The Election Commission of ASG is Northwestern’s version of the Federal Election Commission. “The purpose of the Election Commission is to make sure that all candidates have a level playing field,” says Rachel Lopez, outgoing ASG President. It is a group of seven undergraduate students elected by ASG to police ASG elections. The system is structured such that the Election Commission verifies if and when the official Election Guidelines (which are drafted by the ASG Rules Committee and ratified by the ASG Senate) are followed or broken.

One of the Election Commission’s primary responsibilities involves cataloging receipts to ensure candidates do not exceed their $100 spending limit and to make sure that each and every flyer a candidate wishes to post gets the Election Commission “stamp of approval” (literally).

“We stamp each and every flyer to show the students of Northwestern that these are legal flyers and to ensure them that candidates are within legal spending limits,” Maron says.

“We’ve seen a lot of complaints from candidates where the stamp on an opponent’s flyer will have washed off or it will be missing the phrase ‘paid for by,’” says Mitch Holzrichter, Chief Justice of the ASG Judicial Board. “This is when we step in. We usually just let them get by with a warning, however.”

Despite the occasional “wash-off complaint,” the Commission was surprisingly relieved this year. “Flyering violations as a whole are down this year, which is nice.”

In addition to the flyers, the Election Commission makes sure that each candidate “checks in” everyday and verifies that the computerized tabulation system of voting is adding votes properly.

What happens if you break the rules? If a candidate is found to be engaging in practices not in adherence to the guidelines, the Commission then recommends a punishment based on a point system to the ASG Judicial Board. The ASG Judicial Board then votes whether or not to actually punish the offending candidate and assesses a point penalty to him/her. Each candidate starts with 100 points and appropriate deductions are made for each violation. When 25 points have been deducted, candidates lose their website privileges. Ouch.

In the aforementioned case of the “mystery signature,” the Commission heatedly debated for hours on whether to deduct 15 or 20 points. They decided on 15 simply because the Commission feared that the candidate would be too close to losing his/her website privileges. Apparently, the loss of a website represents an obstacle no candidate could possibly overcome (since everybody reads them and all…).

“We hold hearings to see whether candidates break rules, I get input from the commission on how to design the actual ballots…It is a very time consuming job,” Maron says. But, in most cases it’s the other candidates who bring about complaints.

As a past candidate for an ASG political office, I can reflect fondly upon my past dealings with the Election Commission ...

Some asshole filed a complaint against me, saying that one of the flyers posted on my behalf overlapped another candidate’s flyer—approximately one quarter of an inch. Clearly I was in violation of Election Guidelines. The punishment was swift and brutal, five dollars taken from my Campaign War Chest and a severe scolding from that year’s chairperson.

Another hot topic of contention that the Commission had to tackle in the weeks leading up to the election was the issue of write-in candidates and whether or not they should be allowed in ASG elections. After weeks of debate, the ASG Senate decided not to allow write-in votes. But, much to the chagrin of Maron, the ASG parliamentary body overrode this decision. Maron referred to these actions as a “Saturday night massacre,” saying it was “shady that decisions were made in such a manner.”

Maron’s and the rest of the Commission’s primary concern was that write-in candidates could not be policed by the Election Commission, and subsequently, they could commit any number of violations of the Election Guidelines with no recourse whatsoever. “I am in favor of them if there’s a legitimate plan to police them,” Maron argues. “Otherwise, they could spend as much money as they wanted and post unregulated flyers.” Damn those unregulated flyers.

Srikanth Reddy has decided to give up on engineering, throw away NU Law School and become a writer. Send him your words of encouragement at s-reddy5@northwestern.edu.