say what you want about alan geraldi’s bias (i have said a bit), there remains his argument. he does not believe reasons given by jonathan grinder in his legal opinion are legally valid (grinder found the election flawed). alan has asked that we all get past the issue of bias, and consider what is legal. to honor alan’s request, here are my problems with the legality of the election, and on the following grounds:
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candidates not on the board have been routinely been late to receive news regarding this election (take grinder’s opinion, for example: board members, got it immediately, candidates got it sometime later). the minutes of the election were not (as i understand it) corrected until after the election was over. at least one of those ON the board has stated she thought the minutes, not the discussion, were correct, that is, that ballots were NOT to be collected by candidates, only distributed by the candidates. when did candidates NOT on the board, but running for office, find this out? did they EVER find this out? were they, like mandy white, under the impression the minutes were correct (at least in the all-important issue of ballot collection)? were they expressly told of the REAL rules?
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jim girand has put a lot of stock in how the election has historically been run, that is, and i’m paraphrasing with my own words, “it might be a dirty process, but it’s ALWAYS been a dirty process.” the one thing that is different, however, is the addition of a PDF ballot. if we’re to consider how this election is TRADITIONALLY run as a barometer for how the election ought to be run, the traditional beginning of this election occurs when you and i have in our hands the platform positions (and the one paper ballot you and i have always received) contained in the election issue of the federation’s magazine. the PDF ballot went up on the website prior to that, and it was downloaded, photocopies made (is this another practice in violation of the meeting minutes?), distributed, and collected, prior to anyone even finding out, via USAT’s accepted and traditional practice, what the “other guy” stands for.
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not only is this a departure from the norm, who is it that gets to know when the PDF is published? only board members? or candidates as well? isn’t it rather unfair for someone on the board to be privy to when this PDF is going to go up, when the other candidates are on the dark?
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article 21 of the bylaws states that everything we do must come into conformity with applicable state and federal law. this is a redundency, because whatever we do
must be legal or we can’t do it. but article 21 is an explicit reminder that we can’t just make up funky election procedures because we are, as has been characterised, “a private club.” we aren’t just a private club. we’re a daugher federation of the USOC, which is organized under the “amateur sports act of 1978,” literally an “act of congress.”
i frankly don’t know if the election practices we used are legal. i guess i’ll just bet they’re not, or at least that they’re onerous enough for a judge to trigger another, fairer, cleaner election. grinder stopped short of investigating this because he found enough wrong to stop short of that sort of long analysis. i don’t believe either grinder’s or geraldi’s opinions even barely grace this question.
for the record, these are my problems with the election’s legality. the practices were a disgrace, but that’s not the issue that’ll be voted on tomorrow. the issue is simply legality – should the protest be upheld. as for grinder’s opinion, it may or may not be valid. alan may be right. or partly right. i don’t know. there are my ethical problems with the election, which have already been stated ad nauseum, but these are my legal objections.