In February, the Undergraduate Students Association Council voted to forward several fee-increasing referendums to Chancellor Julio Frenk for approval to appear on the May student ballot. The vote followed weeks of public comment sessions and committee reviews, the standard process for measures that, if passed by students, would add to the mandatory fees that all enrolled undergraduates pay each quarter.
But the vote did not settle the matter cleanly. The USAC Elections Board announced shortly after that it had opened an investigation into the "Bruin Success Referendum," one of the measures forwarded to the chancellor, on the grounds that advocates for the measure may have engaged in promotional activity before the official campaigning period began. Under USAC's elections code, conducting advocacy before the designated campaign window is a procedural violation that can affect a measure's eligibility for the ballot.
The investigation placed the chancellor in an unusual position: he was being asked to approve a measure for the ballot while an internal USAC body was simultaneously reviewing whether that measure had been advanced through a tainted process. The administration has not indicated how it plans to handle the situation, and USAC's own governance documents do not clearly specify the protocol for this scenario.
Students who pay attention to USAC proceedings described the situation as frustrating but not surprising. "There's always something with USAC elections," said one student who has covered USAC proceedings for a campus media organization. "The rules are there, but the enforcement has never been consistent, and the body that's supposed to enforce them doesn't have the resources to do it quickly."
That body is the Judicial Board, which would handle any formal appeal of an Elections Board decision. The Judicial Board's capacity constraints have been the subject of ongoing criticism. Whether it could absorb a contested referendum case on top of its existing caseload before the May election timeline remains an open question.
For undergraduate students who are simply trying to understand what they will be asked to vote on in May, the procedural complexity is an obstacle. USAC's outreach on fee referendums has historically relied on tabling on Bruin Walk and social media campaigns that are difficult to distinguish from general advocacy. Whether those activities cross the line into impermissible pre-campaign promotion is, in practice, a judgment call that the Elections Board is now being asked to make in public.