At 7:00 PM on March 15, the College of Business and Technology's (CBT) Student Council held an Extraordinary General Meeting (EGM) in lecture room 911 of Mugung Hall. Its agenda centered on a vote on the fairness and validity of the then ongoing by-election of CBT Student Council's chairmen.

  EGMs are defined as "extraordinary' for a reason: they must only be convened for urgent matters and need at least 1/15 of the College Steering Committee and the CBT students to request one. Then, why exactly was this assembly convened and what happened in the lead-up?

 

  The lead-up to the assembly convocation

  The controversy started with a post on SeoulTech's anonymous community app Everytime during the by-election campaign period. The post made allegations about one candidate's behavior (candidate B*). In response to the furore, candidate B made a full denial and expressed his intention to take legal action over the post. The controversy then appeared to subside, but further allegations about candidate B were then posted, again on Everytime. This time, a freshman claimed to have been verbally abused and defamed by candidate B during his freshmen orientation, which took place in February.

 

  The orientation had been hosted by the CBT's Department of Global Technology Management's (GTM) Student Council, which uploaded a statement the day after the freshman’s new allegations emerged. The statement said the allegations concerning candidate B were not true and the freshman who posted it was at fault. When the statement was uploaded, GTM Student Council said that the statement had been written without input from its chairmen. However, after a check by the CBT's Electoral Commission, it transpired that the chairmen had, in fact, been involved in crafting the statement. The statement included a rebuttal of the allegations against candidate B, and could therefore be seen as supportive of B. With the chairmen being members of the CBT's Electoral Commission, this appeared to breach their duty under commission rules to remain neutral with regards to election campaign matters. This rule is a fundamental aspect of the Electoral Commission's role in ensuring that elections within the CBT's Student Council are held fairly and with valid results. The statement was seen as potentially beneficial to candidate B, and the Electoral Commission ordered the GTM Student Council to delete it.

  However, this was not the end of the matter. A few days later, GTM Student Council's chairmen posted a hand-written poster at Mugung Hall, including their names and positions and claimed that the by-election was being run unfaily. The poster demanded that an EGM should be held over the issue. With the poster requesting student signatures in support of the claim, there was enough of a stir for a significant number of the CBT students to leave signatures in support of EGM over the matter. Once the threshold of 1/15 of students’ signatures had been passed, the EGM was convened on March 15.

▲ FACT CHECK: the poster

 

  

  After the EGM

  The EGM convened with over 200 people present, and a total of 199 people participated in the vote. In the end, 193 voted that the by-election was being conducted fairly. As per this result, the by election continued after the EGM, finishing on March 16 6:00 PM, with votes counted at 7:00 PM that day. More than twice as many students attended than the required minimum of 80, a fact that indicates that the CBT students were watching the issue with great interest.

 

  Interview: an EGM participant

  In order to get a more detailed account of the EGM, we conducted an interview with a participant, Seunghwan Yeom.

  Q1. Can you tell us what took place at the EGM?

  A1. About 210 students participated in the assembly, including candidate B, the Electoral Commission chairman, and the GTM Student Council's chairmen. The EGM was in a question and answer format, with the Electoral Commission's chairman answering questions regarding the by-election's fairness. At certain points, it felt like a cross-examination. While the GTM Student Council's chairmen, who made the poster, kept to the order of proceedings, candidate B repeatedly cut in while the Electoral Commission's chairman was talking. After about 50 minutes of questions, students who wanted to have their say on the issue spoke, including me. Finally, the agenda's item was resolved with the vote.

  Q2. At the assembly, you spoke about the unfair conduct of Electoral Commission members who wrote the poster. Can you explain this in more detail?

  A2. Initially, I thought it was morally wrong for the GTM Student Council to make a statement at all over the allegations about candidate B, but that was made worse by the fact that its chairmen had been involved in creating the statement. It is not right for them, as commission members, to make a statement which could have benefitted candidate B. The second is about their poster claiming unfair conduct towards B by the Electoral Commission's chairman. Why were Electoral Commission members doing this, rather than candidate B? Again, this could have affacted the election result to the expense or advantage of one candidate. I thought the whole series of events were unfair.

  Q3. I wonder why you decided to speak out about this issue at this assembly.

  A3. Although I didn't particularly want to speak in public, I thought I should because the fact that over 1/15 of CBT's students had requested the assembly showed a significant number of students felt the by-election being unfairly conducted, or could be declared invalid. Even if I had stayed quiet, it would not have affected the result of the EGM's vote, but voting without acknowledging the problems is not a healthy approach.

  The abandonment of neutrality

  The main factor in this issue is the abandonment of neutrality by certain Electoral Commission members. As members of the Electoral Commission, they failed to keep neutral and spread their biased opinions to students without accurate fact-checking. It is plainly wrong to try to intervene in students’ choices by spreading inaccurate information. Besides, they included their names and positions when they published their poster. The effect of this was to present their personal opinion as the department students’ representative opinion. Those elected by students into representative positions should not forget that everything they do in the name of their role comes with a weight of responsibility.

  *There are a total of two candidates running for the 12th CBT Student Council election and this article will name them candidate A and B.

  **The CBT Electoral Commission is a 16-person panel, chaired by the chairman of the CBT Student Council and made up of council members and each president and vice president of all departmental student councils within the CBT.



 

  Reporter,

  Gayeon Han hgy1228@seoultech.ac.kr