Thursday, March 08, 2007
Oh, ouch
So, yeah, my quote is wrong here.
"They decided that unequal treatment in an election is presumably unequal opportunity." Actually, what I said was that unequal treatment in an election is presumptively unequal opportunity. I don't think "presumably" even makes sense in this context. The point I was trying to make was that the important part of the decision wasn't specifically the result, but rather the Council's ruling that:
Regardless of whether the term "incumbent" beside a candidate's name is an advantage, it is clear that it is an additional privilege that is not afforded to non-incumbents. Similarly, the Council has interpreted equal "opportunity for election" to mean that all election regulations should be applied evenly to all candidates. If non-incumbents cannot include any information beyond their allotted seventeen characters, then incumbents should not be able to either. This was a rejection of the defense's argument that in order to show unequal opportunity, one would have to prove that the unequal treatment provides an advantage. That argument was pretty dumb, because it would essentially make it impossible to remedy a violation of equal opportunity before an election, and probably after as well, since ballots are private. There would be no remedy if the Elections Council put one candidate in gigantic letters on the ballot with arrows pointing to her saying "Vote for this candidate," since you couldn't technically prove that it provides an advantage.
With this in mind, I don't much care for the opening line, either:
The ASUC Judicial Council ruled yesterday that the ability of incumbent candidates to list their current elected positions on the ballot gives them an edge over newcomers in the elections. My reading suggests that, considering the quote above, they explicitly decided that the question of whether it's an "edge" or not is not relevant to the question of whether it's unequal opportunty.
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