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Mesa State College’s student government used online voting exclusively for the first time this spring, and their method of dealing with write-in candidates caused the student judiciary to throw out the election results in the race for student trustee.
The student government constitution at Mesa State provides one nomination process for standard candidates for office, and another, with a later deadline, for official write-in candidates. This year, one student ran for student trustee in the ordinary fashion, and two others ran as write-ins.
The voting software the student government used for the election had no provision for write-in candidates, however, so student election officials and advisors agreed to place the names of all three candidates on the ballot screen, with “(write-in)” following two of them.
Write-in candidate Susanna Morris won the election by a two-to-one margin, and incumbent Ashley Mates, the sole non-write-in on the ballot, brought suit in student court.
A new election will be held in the fall.
Richard Peltz, a professor at the University of Arkansas Bowen School of Law, has filed a lawsuit against two students who called him a racist.
The lawsuit names Valerie Nation and Chrishuana Clark, both third-year law students who have been involved with the school’s Black Law Students Association, along with Eric Spencer Buchanan, president of the W. Harold Flowers Law Society. The organizations are also named in the suit.
In the fall of 2005, Peltz gave a lecture in his constitutional law class that March 2007 letter circulated by the Black Law Students Association later described as a “hateful and inciting speech … used to attack and demean the black students in his class.” In light of this and other incidents, the BLSA asked that Peltz be reprimanded by the law school, barred from teaching required courses “where Black students would be required to have him as a professor,” and made to attend diversity training.
In his lawsuit, Peltz contends that these and other “false accusations of racism damaged plaintiff’s reputation, character and integrity in the Arkansas legal community.”
Last Thursday an attorney for Clark filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, contending that “an accusation by a plaintiff that a defendant has called him a racist, in the context of public discourse at a law school,” will not “support a claim for defamation.” The motion contends that Peltz “has embarked on a personal vendetta against two black law students and two predominantly black organizations based on what he perceives as their opposition to him or to his political views and legal theories.”
studentactivism.net 
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