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ASUO ELECTIONS ’12: I’m Tellin Y’all It’s SABOTAGE

Updated 4/9/12 – 3:35 PM

1) ASUO Constitution Court rules “these matters are best left to the ASUO Elections Board for adjudication.”

And also! Both related and unrelated..

2) ASUO Constitution Court rules to remove VP Candidate Lamar Wise from his position as ASUO Senate President as a result of a grievance filed by ASUO Senator Lindy Mabuya.

A Statement from the Katie & Alex Campaign:

“We made it a standard to run a clean campaign and I am extremely disappointed that this isolated incident has occurred where two individuals exercised extremely poor judgment. It saddens me immensely that this has occurred, as the rest of the Katie and Alex team, as well as the Ben and Lamar team, ran an amazing outreach drive to engage students on extremely important matters. The individuals responsible for this have been removed from the campaign.”

Ben Bowman and Lamar Wise of the Ben & Lamar campaign, along with Sam Dotters-Katz of the YES (Your EMU SRC) campaign, have filed grievances against the Katie & Alex campaign; they claim to have been hacked by Chuckie-D himself (Former OSPIRG Chair Charles Denson, spouse of VP Katie Taylor), and that their campaign materials were fucked with.

Wait what? Ben & Lamar’s management team confronted the Katie & Alex campaign, and “at least five” members “came forward with this information and all showed remorse except for Denson*.”

Hacked how? Wise says he lost access to his Gmail after opening a phishing website disguised as a Google Calendar component. Dotters-Katz says his email was also tampered with.

Fucked with how? Denson apparently used “find and replace” to jumble 12,000 phone numbers on a contact list of possible Ben & Lamar voters. The grievance states that hundreds of volunteer hours were wasted making calls to the wrong people. Dotters-Katz had a similar complaint, claiming that contacts of the YES campaign were either deleted or tampered with. Among the deleted was a list of student leaders in support of the campaign.

So who exactly? The grievances name Katie Taylor, Charles Denson, Kerry Snodgrass, Molly Bennison and Andrew Rogers as the people aware of the act.

Sam Dotters-Katz is calling this an “unprecedented act of cyber espionage.”

The Ben & Lamar campaign is calling for an immediate injunction on the election.

As for us at The Oregon Commentator, we’re calling for Katie Taylor and Charles Denson’s expulsion from planet earth. That’s right. We’re tired of writing about them. Did you think we were actually surprised by this? They’re simply living up to what we’ve called them out on being all along: the devil’s spawn. Look, this isn’t an absurd accusation. They’re a young married couple! Why else would they devote themselves to a life’s work of student manipulation? It just doesn’t make any sense.

We’ll just have to see what the ASUO Constitution Court  ASUO Elections Board does about this. Since these grievances concern the devil himself, let’s hope the Court Board likes a good exorcism.

Demons be gone!

*This post is a regurgitation of this ODE article, so read the original. Love you Emily!

 

  1. Thief says:

    Wolf10, do you have any proof to support the allegations you’re making? Because, at the absolute least, the plaintiffs in this case have a confession from the perpetrator. Your poorly worded accusation is simply that until there’s information to back it up.

  2. Lyzi says:

    The Teditor is right. Fiscal conservatism isn’t regressive, it’s sustainable. And a lot of these kids don’t know up from down until the OC tells them.

  3. Wolf10 says:

    you guys are forgetting that ben and lamar’s phone numbers that they are talking about they had because they stole from katie and alex by hacking into their google account. notice how they aren’t mentioning that to the media. just put this all in perspective. nobody’s hands are clean

  4. Angry Dad says:

    For kc: Denson and Garcia would be indicted for the following crimes:

    1) Wire Fraud
    2) Identity Theft
    3) Grand Theft (related to the stealing of the phone list)
    4) Anticipatory Obstruction of Justice
    5) Intentionally accessing an account without authorization

    The first two are federal crimes, the last three are state and/or federal in nature.

    Denson has admitted that he was the guy who masterminded and put the plan into action. Garcia hasn’t denied anything so far. Therefore, as a result, both of them have the potential to be sent to a minimum security prison for anywhere between 2 and 10 years, with a potential minimum fine of $100,000, and will also have a black mark against their federal background check as a result.

    These ain’t just serious allegations, they are corroborated by Denson’s admission himself. Therefore, it’s just a matter of degrees regarding how swift and severe the punishment will be.

    If I were the judge, however, I would throw the book at them and put them in a medium security prison at Sheridan for 10 years.

  5. Jackson says:

    The court’s ridiculous removal of President Wise is as ludicrous as Jen Lleras’ petty grievance against Madame President Hamilton, leading to her removal from the senate in 2007 days before she was expected to sweep the election with Senator Papailiou. Same ASUO, same scandals.

  6. Jackson says:

    What happened to the Students for Responsible Government?!?!?! Scruffy would not have let this happen!

  7. CJ says:

    Just popping in to say I hope it rains grievances and venereal diseases on the ASUO for the rest of time, or at least until the administration razes that filthy office to the ground and salts the earth.

    Carthago delenda est.

  8. Aaron Brooks says:

    Here’s hoping the Elections Board/Administration actually do something about these allegations. ASUO elections are OUT OF CONTROL. People need to be held accountable for their actions.

  9. AEL says:

    Here’s my question: given that Katie Taylor is MARRIED to one of the main perpetrators (Denson), how exactly is she going to expel him from the campaign?

    I should add, this is not the first time OSPIRG types have stooped to rig a student election. There was a really notable instance of such at PSU a few years back. Simply put, OSPIRG and their inflatable turtles need to GTFO, and hopefully, enough people see that now.

  10. Cooper says:

    I can only assume that the Executive plan for a contraption to expel Denson and Taylor from Earth would, in fact, be financed through an increase in the Incidental Fee.

  11. JMB says:

    Amazing title and photo.

    Glad I’m no longer a student at UO so these people can’t steal any more of my money.

  12. kc says:

    Chill. These are just allegations. Former Pres, your comment goes way too far in suggesting ASUO exec people were “involved” in allegedly wrongful activities. The ODE article does not mention those names. Perhaps those individuals supported and worked on the campaign in question, but there is nothing to suggest that any of those individuals approved, condoned, had advance knowledge or had any actual involvement whatsoever in any bad acts allegedly committed by one or two individuals.

  13. Niedermeyer says:

    This is some shameful shit. At the same time, it shows why the OC has to stay seriously engaged in the ASUO. Sure it’s tedious and soul-crushing, but this latest shows how far people will go to keep milking students for cash.

    The OC shouldn’t just be covering and investigating this stuff, it needs to actively champion the fiscal responsibility narrative. If the ASUO weren’t a spewing fountain of cash, nobody would take the time to do this shit. It’s the non-stop, ever-expanding cash giveaway that breeds this kind of corruption, and until the money party is over, the ASUO will keep hitting these “new lows” with regularity.

    This isn’t a liberal versus conservative thing, it’s a corruption versus basic responsibility thing. It needs to be addressed on those terms.

  14. Former Pres says:

    Love this, the pic had me dying haha. So here’s a few more details about what went down:

    University Affairs Coordinator and General Perpetrator of Douchebageery Manny Garcia, sent out an email to student member of ASPAC (Associated Students Presidential Advisory Committee). It’s basically the UO Pres’s student advisory board.

    In Manny’s email, there was a ‘calendar integration tool’, which in fact was a phishing device that solicited login information for people’s goole accounts, and sent people to fake websites. It was quite sophisticated actually.

    Manny Garcia already admitted he knew what he was doing, and he and Charles both state that it was Charles Denson who orchestrated this but Manny who knowingly sent out the emails.

    It is important to note the characters involved: ASUO VP Katie Taylor, ASUO Chief of Staff Kerry Snodgrass, ASUO Communications Director Andrew Rodgers, ASUO University Affairs Coordinator Manny Garcia, ASUO Stoog Molly Benson……

    Notice anything about the above list? They are all members of the ASUO Executive.

    I personally blame Ben Eckstein for all of this, he is the puppet master of this culture of corruption, his bullshit and shady administration sowed the seeds for this sort of malfeasance.

    So…If I may…Any expulsion from earth should include him as well.

  15. DieHardDuck says:

    Elections Board and Con Court do not have it within their powers to remove people from the ballot. This would have to go through administration because they broke the Student Conduct Code as well as the law lol. I’m interested to see what Cedar THINKS he can do and the reality of it.

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