A Feb. 27 re-election has been scheduled to award Reid Chaney or Michael Songer the post.
After further investigation Friday, the board issued seven administrative and punitive orders about candidate Michael Songer's allegations that he was slandered by opponent Reid Chaney's campaign.
After Chaney was declared the winner Wednesday, Songer and his campaign staff charged that an e-mail sent by the Chaney campaign caused irreparable damage to Songer's campaign.
About 5,000 students received an e-mail Monday from Davin McGinnis, former UNC student and Carolina Fever president, asking them to "put an honest man in office" by voting for Chaney.
Songer said the e-mail was slanderous, and his campaign tried to link McGinnis to Chaney's campaign with a printed copy of an e-mail that was slipped under Songer's door. The e-mail, allegedly written by McGinnis to Fever Co-chairman Eric Ellis, CAA President Tee Pruitt and former CAA Vice President Bryan Hart, said the Monday e-mail had been written to "keep Songer out of office."
But the Board of Elections found the e-mail to be "highly irregular and probably a forgery," thus eliminating any link between the Chaney campaign and the e-mail slandering Songer's campaign.
The board ruled that the illegal Monday e-mail could have swayed the election. After 27 invalid write-in votes were eliminated from the total, Chaney was declared the race's winner -- with just five votes more than the needed majority.
And because the e-mail, which said Songer played no role in the implementation of risers in the Smith Center last fall, was a misrepresentation of elections issues and violated elections laws, the board called for a re-election.
"The board concluded that the reputations of both candidates Songer and Chaney had been damaged by the McGinnis e-mail," the board wrote. "A re-election gives both candidates an opportunity to put themselves before the student body and gain a result unsullied by McGinnis' illegal 11th-hour e-mail."
