Tanisha Saraff eliminated after violating campaign expenditures sanctions.
Voting for the Undergraduate Student Government special election opened Sept. 18 to fill two senate seats. Voting closed on Sept. 20. (Henry Kofman / Daily Trojan)
Undergraduate Student Government special election candidate Tanisha Saraff was disqualified Sunday following several campaign violations.
USG held special elections last week to fill two vacant senate seats — with voting occurring Sept. 18-20 and results to be announced Tuesday night at their senate meeting.
The judicial council reprimanded Saraff after receiving an anonymous tip Friday regarding Saraff’s distributing cookies at Leavey Library on Thursday and prompting students to vote for her. The council then received a second tip — also on Friday — alleging Saraff had been campaigning with a sign, marker and posters.
This campaign strategy violated prohibitions against spending any money on special election campaigning and providing goods in exchange for votes. Saraff, a sophomore majoring in economics and math, said she was not aware of the rules she had violated at the time.
“[After receiving the sanctions], I felt really stupid for not going through the elections code properly,” Saraff said. “The first thing that I did was go through the elections code, because I was feeling very naive. I was trying to understand the capacity in which I violated the different rules laid out by them.”
In a regular election, candidates are permitted to distribute physical items on campus, although candidates are still prohibited from exchanging goods for votes. Special elections use a unique set of rules to expedite the process and allow candidates to focus on spreading their platform through social media.
“Special elections are naturally more expedited and streamlined compared to general elections, and our primary focus is filling vacant seats quickly,” chief justice Susanna Andryan said. “It wouldn’t be efficient to invest time and resources and money into traditional campaign materials.”
On Friday morning, the judicial council barred Saraff from campaigning for the rest of the day and ordered her to shut down her campaign account immediately as sanction for the code violation.
Though Saraff deactivated her campaign account, she posted a call to vote in the special election on her personal Instagram account later that day.
The judicial council ruled that action was in violation of their sanctions and disqualified Saraff from the election entirely. Saraff accepted the decision and waived her right to a hearing but said she did not understand the rules of the sanctions at the time.
“The notice that they sent me asked me to stop campaigning, but I didn’t understand the
full implication of the context in which they were referring to campaigning,” Saraff said. “But then, when I went through that email like a second and a third time, and I was asking other people to also interpret that for me, I was able to get more clarity on why I made that mistake.”
Prior to the election, the judicial council held a mandatory candidate meeting to set the guidelines and rules.
“I made it very specific that in no way could candidates spend money on the election,” Andryan said. “We also said, ‘We’re not giving a budget,’ so they shouldn’t be spending their own money.”
Saraff said she learned a lot from the experience and plans to run in the USG senate general election held in spring.
“I had so much passion that I was bringing to the campaign,” she said. “Because of that passion, I got carried away and didn’t realize the limitations of the special elections code.”
Andryan said she hopes to update the current elections code to reflect the values of the council and ensure fairness throughout the election process.
“I will be more clear in terms of pre-owned materials. In terms of the elections code itself, the judicial council is working on current reforms of the elections code as well, just to make things more specific,” Andyran said.
