GPSA presidential candidate Martin Gutierrez ignored the GPSA council’s recommendation to disclose all of his campaign funding and expenses by Monday at 5 p.m.
On Sunday evening, Gutierrez said GPSA should be focusing on issues that matter to students, such as tuition — not where campaign funds are coming from or how much he is spending.
“We’ve got to get to the business of students and stop worrying about distractions,” Gutierrez said.
However, Irene Parra, Gutierrez’ campaign staffer, said the list of contributions would be provided “no later than Tuesday.” Gutierrez was not available for comment on Monday.
The GPSA council passed the recommendation Saturday. Brandi Lawless, a GPSA representative, and GPSA President Lissa Knudsen originally drafted the recommendation.
“It encourages candidates to disclose information because it’s the right thing to do,” Knudsen said Thursday.
Lawless said she drafted the resolution partly in response to an option on GPSA presidential candidate Martin Gutierrez’ Web site. Gutierrez is accepting PayPal donations through his Web site, but he offers no list of contributors or expenses.
“If you’re going to accept donations, I think it’s important to know where it’s coming from so someone like a regents member isn’t donating,” Lawless said.
On Saturday, the council changed the resolution to a recommendation, encouraging both presidential and council chair candidates to disclose all GPSA and non-GPSA campaign contributions by Monday at 5 p.m.
Knudsen released her campaign funding information Monday in a spreadsheet, which listed both her revenues and expenditures as zero.
In other election woes, a little more than 60 graduate student votes were tossed out early Monday morning due to an election software glitch.
Between 8 a.m. and 8:43 a.m., 62 votes were cast in the GPSA presidential election. However, Information Technologies Spokeswoman Vanessa Baca said the election software, Opinio, malfunctioned and allowed students to vote multiple times.
“As the election is set up to be anonymous, IT does not have information as to who voted or how many times they may have voted, just the number of votes cast,” Baca said in an e-mail.
Specifically, the voter authorization component of Opinio stopped functioning, Baca said.
After 8:43 a.m., IT fixed the problem and the polls remained open without glitches throughout the day.
GPSA elections chair Sophia Hammett sent an e-mail to graduate students informing them of the glitch and asking students who voted within the 43-minute window to cast their votes again.
“It is concerning, but stuff happens. No one wants the process to go smoothly and without errors more than me,” she said. “We caught it really early and got it resolved. I think we handled it as best we could.”
Hammett said she will confer with the GPSA court of review about extending the election by 43 minutes on Thursday. However, if the extension resulted in a one-day delay of getting the results, Hammett said, she would recommend against it.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
As of 2:30 p.m. on Monday, GPSA had not requested that IT extend the election. Until then, Baca said IT would continue to look into the glitch.
“There were no other impacts to the election that we are aware of,” she said. “IT will continue investigating the technical issue and vendor issues affecting Opinio.”
