Four out of five Presidential candidates have received fines for breaking campaign rules in the run up to this week’s OUSU elections.
OUSU’s Returning Officer, Jonathan Edwards, has published a public list of complaints against candidates or their activists acting in ways that contravene the many complex rules that govern election campaigns. Some complaints have been dismissed while some have seen teams forced to pay small fines. Presidential candidates, David Railton, David Townsend, Jacob Diggle and James Weinberg have all been fined for offences committed under their names.
Had the rule breaking been more serious the Returning Officer would have had the power to enforce harsher disciplinary measures, such as disqualification or even referral to the Proctors in cases of suspected harassment.
Jonathan Edwards told Cherwell, “The three slates with presidential candidates have all had their publicity budgets reduced due to various breaches of the rules, but none of them dramatically. There has also been one candidate who had their deposit fined £10 for two very similar rules breaches in quick succession.”
He commented, “There have been more complaints than last year, but this is only to be expected with a larger number of candidates and very few of them unopposed.”
Examples of the kind of complaints raised against the candidates include incidences of activists or Common Room Presidents supporting more than one slate and mistakes or misleading statements in manifestoes.
One incident saw David Townsend’s presidential slate caught up in controversy after an email was sent to MCR Presidents which said, ‘The Oxford Student newspaper is administering a survey to assess your knowledge and interest in the upcoming elections”, although the paper had never agreed to commission such a survey. Team Townsend was stripped of 5 percent of its publicity budget for this misdemeanour.
In defence of his campaign team David Townsend commented, “Without wishing to comment on details of particular rulings, I’m proud to say that even where complaints against members of my team have been upheld, the Returning Officer has in each and every case confirmed the honesty of the person in question, even if that person did make an innocent mistake under the Standing Orders.”
He added, “no major team in these elections escaped without some financial penalty or other.”
Independent presidential candidate Alex Shattock, who is the only one not to have been fined for rule-breaks, commented “I hear that David Jamiroquai Townsend (‘The Townsinator’) has now been fined 10% of his budget, after his appeal from 5%. I completely support him on this issue and he should appeal again.”
However, he then went on to suggest that, in his opinion, Townsend had made some errors in judgement, “In many ways it is his own fault, for associating with the seedy underclass of centre-left Oxford students. I always knew Alex Harvey [an activist for Team Townsend] was a sinister character. His eyes have a kind of dead, relentless hunger to them. Once he told me that he likes his women like he likes his coffee; ‘ground up and in the freezer’. Another time he mentioned that he keeps the severed hand of a child in his left pocket, ‘just in case’. I laughed nervously, but he just stared.” Cherwell cannot substantiate these claims.
Townsend also told Cherwell that he felt that too much emphasis was put on these minor rules infringements and commented, “I think that elections should be decided by voters, not by campaign teams behind the scenes pecking away at each others’ budgets with fines for minor infractions of OUSU’s Standing Orders. The real loser in the latter situation is Oxford students, who just get a less engaged, more rules-dominated Student Union.”
James Weinberg also argued that the attention on minor rule breaking detracted from what was important in the elections and commented particularly on the difficulty of running as an independent candidate.
He said, “as an independent without agents to act on my behalf, the complaints against me consumed a lot of my time that might otherwise have been spent culturing support among the student population. Thankfully testimonies from tutors at Hertford were sufficient to dismiss the allegations against me, but nevertheless these repeated actions were clearly aimed to waste my time, and to discredit me.”
He added, “In my eyes this is completely against the ethos of a student election and epitomises the cold calculation of the slate system. I chose to run independently because I wanted people to vote for me on the basis of my policies, not on the basis of how many people from the current OUSU clique I had running round hassling the electorate for me.
‘OUSU needs to change if its to escape the kind of in-biting that has characterised aspects of this election and I hope more of those who have become disillusioned with this aspect to the student union log on to vote for that change. To be successful, OUSU needs to become a social and political hub for the majority, and I can only hope that people take the time to read what I have to say about returning the students union to its primary function of bringing students together.“
Jacob Diggle, on the other hand, remained more positive about this year’s election campaign despite the complaints raised against him and his fellow candidates. He commented, “Elections obviously have to be fair to all candidates and the rules are there to ensure that. The Join Jacob team thinks that our ideas are strong enough without resorting to underhand tactics. We’ve been impressed with how clean this election has been, and commend all candidates for fighting a good campaign.”
