The LSU Student Government Election Commission postponed announcing voting results Wednesday following confusion and disagreement over the election code. 

“There is a piece of the code that can be interpreted in two different ways,” said Election Commission Chair Kennedy Dorr, “and we are waiting for a better answer on what they meant.”

The delay comes amid a slew of unresolved judicial complaints filed by the Empower and Energize campaigns. The phenomenon is common to SG elections. 

According to the SG election code, when the judicial branch finds a campaign has violated the code, that campaign is assessed a number of penalties depending on the section violated. Eight or more penalties disqualifies a campaign from the election. 

This election cycle, a new amendment to the code stipulated all judicial complaints must be handed a final decision before the election results are announced. However, a typo in the new code made the reading of that amendment more ambiguous. 

Student Sen. Colin Raby from the College of Engineering authored that bill. 

“I see where the confusion came from,” he said Wednesday, “because in my bill there was a pretty crucial word that was in there that for some reason whoever put it into our current code failed to copy. That word was ‘after.’”

When Raby submitted his petition, section 511 of the election code read, “The unofficial results of the general election shall be announced by the chair in an appropriate campus location and uploaded to the student government website, the ruling of all complaints pending before the election court or appeals pending before the university court have been announced as final.”

The omission of the single word made the code less legible, but Raby said he believed the reading remained the same: No election results should be announced until judicial complaints are finished. 

Sen. Raby said he was motivated to create the amendment after developments during SG’s last election cycle. 

He said he thought it would be difficult for the judicial branch to fairly decide campaign complaints after the results of the popular vote had announced a winner. The intention of his bill, he said, was to prevent that dilemma. 

When Raby saw that the Election Commission intended to announce the most recent vote on Wednesday, a number of judicial complaints had yet to be heard. He filed a petition to the judicial branch to delay the announcement. The judicial branch scheduled a hearing to decide the matter for April 8—more than two weeks out from when the Election Commission first planned to announce the preliminary election results.

Judicial complaints from the Empower campaign also asked for an injunction of the election announcement, but hearings for those cases also fell after the Election Commission’s announcement time at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday. 

Dorr decided Wednesday afternoon to postpone the announcement while the election code remained in dispute. 

“I’m really just pushing for the code to be followed,” Dorr said. “I don’t want it to be misinterpreted in any way.”

Wednesday night, the Reveille found the election code typo that had caused so much ruckus had been corrected without announcement. 

Meanwhile, the judicial branch has scheduled hearing times for the campaign complaints that flooded the SG branch before their filing deadline on Tuesday. 

Judicial campaign complaints from both Empower and Energize have steadily trickled into the branch; most have come from the Empower campaign, and all of the complaints had been dismissed until Tuesday.  

On March 20, Energize filed suit against Empower alleging Empower candidates had used the likenesses of students unaffiliated with the campaign in campaign material—a violation of SG election code.

The material in question, a series of Instagram posts from Empower candidates, were found by the judicial branch in a preliminary judgment to have featured students that were either unaffiliated with a campaign, affiliated with Energize or required by SG election code to be neutral.

Additionally, the judicial branch preliminarily ruled that the wording of some of the posts inferred that the candidates carried the endorsement of an SG office—also a violation.

If the ruling stands, the violations on behalf of Empower amounted to the assignment of six penalties, two shy of the eight or more required to disqualify a campaign.

A final judgment is expected to be released prior to midnight April 3. 

When reached for comment, Joseph Liberto, head of the Energize campaign, said he would not yet say anything about the court’s decision. 

John Michael Sweat of the Empower campaign said in a message to the Reveille that the proceedings had been “very civil, none of us are fighting, we have disputes that we’re settling via the proper channels.”