The governing board of the University of North Carolina system will meet on Friday to decide whether to hand out discipline in a bizarre case of alleged interference in a student-government election.
Two trustees at East Carolina University have been accused of recruiting a student to run for student-body president, a voting member of the Board of Trustees, in an effort to advance their own agendas in university governance. Specifically, Phil Lewis and Robert Moore allegedly promised to pay for the unnamed student’s campaign and even offered to hire a campaign manager if the student agreed to vote with them on certain issues and to keep the agreement confidential, according to reporting from The News & Observer.
At a Wednesday meeting, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors’s committee on university governance recommended that no action be taken against Lewis and Moore, according to reporting by the university’s student newspaper, The East Carolinian.
Lewis and Moore wrote in a letter to the UNC system’s board that they had met with the student with “the best intentions of furthering the higher interests of the university.”
That trustees would try to sway a student-government election is odd on its face, given the generally low interest in such matters among the student body itself. But the incident is not without precedent. In recent years, there have been several documented cases of outside interference in student elections.
In 2016 the winning candidate in the race for student-body president accused the president of Florida A&M University of unfairly influencing the campus election. The allegation was made after the president agreed to hold a new election when the losing candidate challenged the initial count.
The winner asserted that the president, Elmira Mangum, had allowed the new election because the losing candidate was an ally and, if elected, would have voted in her favor on the Board of Trustees. A year earlier the board had nearly voted to oust the president. (Mangum stepped down in 2016, about six months after the allegations of interference were made against her.)
Rick Perry, the former U.S. secretary of energy, waded into controversy over the student-government election at his alma mater, Texas A&M University at College Station, in 2017. Specifically, he wrote an editorial in the Houston Chronicle alleging unfair influence by the Student Government Association, saying the election had “made a mockery of due process and transparency.”
Bobby Brooks, an openly gay candidate, won the election even though he hadn’t received the most votes. The top vote-getter, Robert McIntosh, was disqualified after he failed to produce receipts for glow sticks used in a campaign video. Perry’s editorial suggested that McIntosh’s identity as a straight, white man may have influenced his disqualification.
But by far the biggest source of alleged outside interference in student-government elections in recent years has been the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA. Reporting by The Chronicle in 2017 showed that Turning Point had helped conservative candidates on traditionally progressive campuses by paying for signs and T-shirts, providing campaign advice, and supplying election-day volunteers.
In 2017, students at Ohio State University and the University of Maryland at College Park dropped out of campuswide elections after they violated spending rules and attempted to hide help they had received from Turning Point.
The same year, Turning Point supplied candidates at the University of Wisconsin at Madison with campaign materials. That prompted the university’s student government to change its rules, requiring candidates to disclose campaign or materials donations by a third party.
The 2016 election of Marcus Fotenos as student-body president at the University of Colorado at Boulder drew fire after allegations emerged that he had attempted to buy votes with free food. The university’s election commission voided his win until a prominent elections lawyer with conservative ties got involved. Fotenos was reinstated as the winner.
Fotenos later helped persuade state lawmakers to pass a 2017 bill outlawing “free-speech zones” on campuses, a measure praised by Turning Point USA.
