By Zach Marks
Corrected at 2:42 a.m. An earlier version of this blog post said Kristian Henderson won the YDN’s endorsement for YSAC Chair. Colin Leatherbury in fact won the endorsement.
No more than a few hours of voting had passed before reports of the election’s first violation started trickling in. Yalies in (at least) the Davenport and Silliman dining halls with an appetite for some news with their grass-fed burgers found Abigail Cheung for Secretary stickers on the front of their YDNs. Friends of Cheung’s opponent Jasper Wang and clean election advocates naturally responded by snitching to employees working the ID swipe stations.
“This some bullshit,” one student was heard yelling. “True, true,” the ID swiper responded before dumping all the YDNs tarnished with the Cheung sticker in the recycling.
Cheung will undoubtedly suffer some bad publicity for her violation. But the tactic may have helped her in the short run: her stickers resulted in the mass trashing of YDNs, causing many Yalies to miss today’s YDN endorsement of Cheung’s opponent, Jasper Wang. So Yalies who voted today might have done so without having seen the YDN’s endorsement and without knowing about Cheung’s transgression. The other YDN-endorsed candidates – Rich Tao, Emily Schofield, Jon Wu, Colin Leatherbury and Anne Xu – will likely handle their beef with Cheung in that shady, smoke-filled room kinda way that politicians handle their beef.
Yalies weren’t so happy when they found Abby’s stickers on their YDNs.
This isn’t the first complaint about Cheung’s campaign. One of the most talked-about tactics of this election has been Cheung’s distribution of CDs with hit songs that she encouraged Yalies to rip and return. She wrote me an e-mail this morning defending the practice:
i checked with the EC [election committee] and taber before putting up my putting up my cds, and they are legit. i feel like the manner in which you presented my putting up the cds makes it appear as if they are not allowed, which suggests that i am breaking rules, when in fact i am not. i would really appreciate if you removed that implication.
Cheung was referring to Ryan Russell’s mention of the CDs (which he claimed he loved…but who doesn’t love NOW! That’s What I Call Music mixes?). They may be legit under YCC election law, but it’s understandable that some are questioning the ethics of using pirated music for self-promotion. Abby, you’re not the first to get hit by the long arm of the law and you won’t be the last. But dirty politics gets you put on blast.