The appeals board presented its findings to Graduate Student Senate regarding the president elections for next year.
Members did not to pass a resolution that would deny certifying presidential elect Dareen Tadros as the next official GSS president.
The resolution was put forth by Daniel Williams, the head of the appeals board, and the rest of its members Kayla Gross, Amid Vahedi, Gillian McCareen, Grayson Basina and JP Nassif after they concluded the elections were not held to a reasonable expectation of democracy and justice.
“We decided after reviewing the (rules and procedures) that the appeals board is granted broad powers of action, there are no limits in place to what the actions of the appeals board could be,” Williams said. “We felt that seemed inappropriate. This is a democracy, and we are not appointed dictators, so we wrote resolutions to present to the body.”
The appeals board presented 11 separate findings. Several findings concluded that the execution of the election had the potential to affect the outcome.
The appeals board also found that the last-minute change to the schedule of the elections, which was a result of miscommunication between the executive board, was “prohibitive” to participation in the elections.
The appeals board found that Tadros attempted to interfere with the appeals process, but her actions ultimately did not affect the functionality of the board.
It was also found that there was no conspiracy to elect Tadros or Brett Fredericksen, the GSS presidential candidate who submitted the appeal that created the appeals board in February.
After discussion of whether or not the body would go into executive session to privately speak about sensitive details within the boards findings, they did not have the two-thirds majority vote needed to go into that session.
Over 30 community members from outside GSS attended the meeting in order to hear the decision the appeals board made. The body had an extensive discussion before deciding to reject the resolution.
John Nece, representative for accounting, and Daniel Warmke, representative for media arts and studies, said they believed if they held new elections the results would be skewed, which was an underlying issue presented to the appeals board originally.
Tadros said as the next GSS president she would like to work on becoming more inclusive and trying to engage the graduate students further to increase the visibility of GSS.
“To reach out to the graduate students to understand some of their needs and their priorities, and then to work with the administration and faculty closer,” Tadros said. “Because in the end, we all aim to serve the students and to improve their experience during their education process.”
The body also approved two other resolutions.
One resolution proposed to make it a requirement that all graduate assistants place the information for survivor advocacy, mandatory reporting and counseling resources on their syllabi.
GSS also passed another resolution which would request funding for the GSS vice president and treasurer positions.
Michael Senteny, GSS treasurer, said this resolution came after discussions between the body and executives last semester and this year.
Senteney said the roles being compensated would create a more competitive candidate pool for GSS elections, and it would also provide an incentive to the two roles in order to divide the work between all three executives in a more “equitable” way.
The resolution asks that the two positions be compensated in comparison to what Ohio University’s Student Senate receives and what other Ohio senate’s receive.
