A disqualified Downtown presidential candidate is claiming he was pressured by University administrators to stop asking for a third-party review of his campaign’s disqualification.
Less than two weeks after Andres Cano and his running mate Vaughn Hillyard were disqualified for violating election code bylaws, the two candidates agreed to sign an official statement that said they would no longer call for a judiciary committee to review their violations.
The statement was signed and released publicly April 19. On April 15, a meeting took place between Cano, president-elect Christian Vasquez, Department of Student Engagement Director Cassandra Aska and dean of Downtown Student Affairs Georgeana Montoya.
“I did a very deliberate attempt to stall and delay the conversation,” Cano said. “I wasn’t sure what it was going to be when I walked in, and then when it was clear that it was a push for me to concede then and there … I continued to stall the conversation.”
Aska said she and Montoya did not tell Cano what course of action the disqualified candidate needed to take.
“The purpose of the meeting was to encourage the dialogue to continue to happen between [Cano and Vasquez], for them to come up with a decision as to how to resolve the questions that were still pending for them,” she said.
Aska said her role as an adviser for the Downtown student government is to work with students and encourage them to discuss their grievances.
“I think [the meeting] was just to create a space — a neutral space — where both of them could come together and have dialogue,” she said.
There were two reasons the administration got involved, Aska said.
“Part of it was because students were asking for it,” she said. “The other part of it, I think, is again, that’s my role as an adviser — to support those kind of things.”
Montoya’s office said all questions related to the issue were to be answered by Aska.
Vasquez denied the administration was favoring either candidate in the meetings.
“They were there to make sure that we had a space to discuss and how to move this forward,” he said.
Cano and Hillyard were formally disqualified from the student government presidential race April 8, giving Vasquez the win by default.
Claiming some of the violations charges filed against them were unfair, the two candidates tried to appeal before the Downtown Elections Committee. However, no appeals process exists in the Downtown elections code, therefore, the committee was not able to officially evaluate an appeal.
On April 14, the committee sent an e-mail to both parties, giving Vasquez the authority to decide whether to have Cano and Hillyard take their case before a judicial board at either the Tempe or West campuses.
Deciding to follow the elections code where no third-party review is specified, Vasquez and his running mate Jessica Abercrombie responded that they would not give Cano permission to go to a third party.
Cano said he and his running mate began to rethink their stance following a Friday meeting with Vasquez and Abercrombie.
This was the beginning of a conversation about what he was fighting for, Cano said.
“We’re fighting for the 58 percent of Downtown students that voted for us, but we’re also going up against an administration that has said that this is something that needs to end,” he said.
On Monday, April 19, the two tickets signed a document agreeing to officially end the debate and recognize Vasquez and Abercrombie as the president and vice president of next year’s student government.
Reach the reporter at kjdaly@asu.edu
