At the John D. MacArthur campus in Jupiter, there’s a library. And in that library, there’s a cluster of offices. And tucked inside that cluster is a room. And in that room, which has been vacant for the past five months, there’s Noemi Coltea. All those months, Coltea fought hard to get back into this room.
It’s the room that belongs to the Student Government MacArthur campus governor. Last year, it was Coltea’s. Then it wasn’t. Now it is again.
“I’ve been taking care of the itsy-bitsy things, like setting up my office and getting things in order,” says Coltea, who took her seat behind the governor’s desk on Sept. 14, after not one, or two, but three separate elections.
The original Student Government election was held April 14-15. Coltea was the incumbent, running for re-election. While Student Government has political parties much like state and federal governments, Coltea was an independent. Her two challengers weren’t: Andrew Wallace was running with the KEG Party, while Valentine Sobirov was with the Gold Party.
When the votes were counted, none of the candidates had captured the 51 percent of the vote necessary to win, so the top two contenders, Coltea and Wallace, moved to a runoff. This time, Wallace won. But within 48 hours, Coltea was contesting the results. And that’s where it got messy.
Dropping the ball
Before the original election, Coltea was suspended by MacArthur Elections Commissioner Jason Mulack for violating campaign rules-specifically, posting campaign posters in residence halls, which she says she didn’t know was illegal. As punishment, Mulack suspended her from campaigning for two days, April 14-15.
“The two days I was suspended were the election days-the days that mattered,” Coltea says. “Andrew Wallace could set up tables and campaign, and I couldn’t.”
Coltea believes this was the reason she and Wallace ended up in a dead heat, and she promptly filed elections violations-not against Mulack, who oversaw elections on the campus in Jupiter, but against Supervising Elections Commissioner Lee Newman, who represented SG on all campuses.
Coltea also filed a violation against Wallace, whom she claims went through personal files on her SG computer before the election. And this, says Newman, is where the problems really began.
According to SG statutes, violations must be filed within 48 hours of the polls closing. Though Coltea says she submitted her violations on time, two things happened at that point to hinder her case. First, Coltea faxed her violations to Newman at the Boca campus SG office. Newman received two pages in the fax, though Coltea says she sent three-and the one listing the violations against Newman is the one he didn’t get.
Coltea claims Newman “threw away” the sheet containing the violations, while Newman says she shouldn’t have faxed the pages in the first place.
“I don’t have to accept faxes,” Newman says. “She took it upon herself to fax me the violations and she claims she had three pages, but the machine only sent two. She didn’t use the machine correctly. She should have contacted me to get me the information.”
As for Coltea’s claim that Wallace went through her computer files, Wallace says she is “maliciously lying” and that the computer belonged to SG, not her.
“She was using that computer to campaign,” Wallace says, “which is a violation of the election statutes. I looked on the computer and found proof of this. Turning her computer on would not automatically give me access to her records, nor did I attempt to gain access.”
The second problem with Coltea’s protest was that, according to Newman, then-Chief Justice Dana Roberts neglected to do her job. As with the U.S. Supreme Court, Roberts is SG’s highest judicial officer. If violations are filed, it’s the chief justice’s responsibility to have a hearing with the Student Court and open a case. Newman says Roberts did nothing.
“It was ridiculous,” Newman says. “It was a whole mess because [Roberts] didn’t do anything with it.”
But Roberts says it wasn’t that simple. Every year, a new SG administration comes in and all the previous officials are removed from their positions.
“The contestation was happening two weeks before my term ended,” Roberts says. “[Coltea] was able to file complaints with me, but by the time everything was worked out, my term was over. When everyone hired to take care of a problem has no job anymore, who does that problem go to?”
The matter remained unresolved-and MacArthur had no governor at all-until a new SG administration took over at the beginning of the summer. One of incoming Student Body President Alvira Khan’s jobs was hiring a new chief justice. After a month of interviews, the job went to Max Leynov, who then found Coltea’s contestations sitting on his desk.
“People just dropped the ball so many times, it eventually came into my court, and I picked it up and ran with it,” Leynov says.
With the proper channels finally in place, Coltea requested a recount of the runoff votes. But again, Wallace won. At the time, Leynov didn’t have a full Student Court-imagine if the U.S. Supreme Court had justices who graduated every semester, and new ones always had to be found. So another group took over the investigation. Called the University Wide Council (UWC), this group of top-ranking SG officials acts as a fourth branch of government, ruling over some of the biggest budgets in SG, ranging from the University Center on the Boca campus to Homecoming on all campuses. This time, they came together as a de facto Student Court.
After hearing Coltea’s case, the UWC decided that she had a point: Not being allowed to campaign during the two days of the election may have skewed the results. It ordered a third election for the governor. According to SG statutes, this “re-election” needed to happen seven days after the UWC’s order, but that would have been in the middle of June. Since the MacArthur campus doesn’t offer Summer B classes, there weren’t any students to vote. The election was put off until the fall.
At this point, the room inside the cluster offices inside the library on the MacArthur campus had been vacant for three months.
The results are in (again)
As the chief executive for all FAU campuses, Khan took over the role of governing the MacArthur campus during this strange time.
“[The MacArthur SG] was fully functional,” Khan says. “People were appointed during that time to cabinet positions, and I made sure the candidates had input on the decisions so when the winner came in, he or she would know what was going on.”
Finally, on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, MacArthur students went to the polls for a third and final time. Coltea, with 200 votes to Wallace’s 94, returned to her position as governor (see related story, pg. 4).
Newman, whose job as supervising commissioner ended in June, says he feels Wallace’s alliance with the KEG Party was his downfall, since the majority of the current UWC members campaigned with the Gold Party.
“I felt that my leaving removed any sense of unbiasedness in the re-election,” he says. “Max [Leynov] became the commissioner, and the UWC became the commission. It’s not surprising that Noemi [Coltea] won, since Andrew [Wallace] was on the party everyone else ran against. It seemed obvious to me they wanted Andrew out.”
Wallace isn’t pleased about how things turned out, either.
“I am disappointed more than anything,” he says. “It’s the only game I’ve ever played where two out of three is a losing score. The unfortunate part is that nothing significant was accomplished in five months, and our campus was allowed to languish.”
Coltea agrees. She wishes the matter had been handled sooner so she could have had the summer to do official tasks like oversee student orientations. Still, she’s optimistic about her time left in office.
“We’ve gotten more accomplished in two weeks than they did in five months,” Coltea says. “[Students] finally have an authority figure who can make decisions. I have about 10 projects I’m working on, but my main concern is getting the staff hired and trained and getting the wheels in motion.”
Though she’s happy to be back at work, Coltea admits to enjoying the time off. “It was good for me to get away from FAU and the bureaucracy for a little bit,” she says. “You have to get seven permissions just to breathe.”
MacArthur Senate Speaker Heather Boyer, who was re-elected again this year on Wallace’s ticket, says she knows she can work with Coltea.
“Honestly, she campaigned very hard for it, and we are going to do our best to work together to benefit the students,” Boyer says. “We worked together in the past and will work together again.”
Though most SG officials seem relieved that it’s finally over, some think more problems lie ahead for FAU’s Student Government.
“People need to be held accountable,” Coltea says. “It was the first time in SG that leaders were held accountable for what they did. In SG, you really have to convince them that they did anything wrong.”
Newman, who now works with the College of Business and says he’s glad to be away from SG, is even blunter: “I think it’s a problem that SG runs unchecked. They kind of run off and do their own thing. Students should keep up with this, but nobody cares.”
