Not everybody gets to see Drew Lederman’s profile. Those who were privy to his screen name the week before he became the Student Association’s president elect would have seen a message encouraging students to vote for Lederman and comptroller candidate Maggie Misztal, along with a link to the SA website. It was right there, on the same computer screens students could use to cast their ballots. It wasn’t a violation of the election code, but should it have been?

‘I think it would get a little ridiculous if we were fining people for this,’ Lederman said.

The recent SA election saw an increase in the use of the Internet as a campaign tool, with candidates looking for votes via America Online Instant Messenger and university listservs, SA President Andrew Thomson said. The election also saw comptroller candidate Rosslyn Ortega fined for placing election materials too close to computers, which serve as polling stations for SA’s online voting system. While SA election codes lay out strict guidelines for printed materials near a polling place, they have little to say about online campaign messages that appear on the polling place itself.

Thomson said SA’s Committee on Administrative Operations is looking at how the rise in online campaigning could impact the fairness of an election, specifically considering whether websites containing campaign material can be viewed in university computer clusters. The only regulation of online campaigning currently on the books is one that prohibits candidates from providing a link directly to the online ballot form on their campaign website. Links must instead run to SA’s homepage, Thomson said.

Its not likely that SA will take steps to regulate campaigning with AIM and university listservs, Thomson said. Regulating listserv endorsements might risk infringing on the liberty of the organizations that operate the lists, while AIM presents its own set of problems.

If paper campaign materials are found near a polling station, the candidate can escape fines if he or she can show that they were not placed there by someone associated with the campaign. If a similar rule were passed for AIM campaigning, it would be difficult to sort out any violation since AIM conversations are often passed along from candidates’ friends into the general public.

‘At what point do you say that the chain has stopped and the person is no longer part of the [campaign] staff?’ Thomson said.

This semester’s election is by no means the first in which candidates have reached out to students on the web. SA’s online voting system has been in place for two years, but candidates recognized listservs as an effective means of getting their message to a large number of students at once.

‘To me that isn’t something that has to do with online voting,’ Lederman said. ‘Even if it was ballots, we’d do the same thing.’

The online campaigning phenomenon hasn’t spread to many of the schools that have made the jump to online polling for student government elections. At Indiana State University, the Student Government Association has been using its online voting system, but SGA Chief of Staff Doug Huntsinger, a senior political science major, says he hasn’t seen much use of AIM or listservs in campaigns.

‘We didn’t really see a problem with it because we haven’t had any complaints over it,’ Huntsinger said.

Indiana State’s listserv, called the ‘Campus Pipeline,’ is tightly regulated by university staff and does not allow campaign messages, Huntsinger said.

The aspiring student leaders at Indiana State might not even need the Internet to campaign. The centralized nature of the university’s campus allows candidates to campaign in person more effectively, Huntsinger said.

Published on November 12, 2003 at 12:00 pm