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Michigan College Republican politics, Part I
By punch bowl | January 7, 2008
With so much going on in Iowa and New Hampshire this week who would have thought that a political whirlwind would have struck Michigan this weekend - but that is exactly what happened.
To sort it all out, I will do a series of posts with the goal of shifting through what is truth and what is spin.
This post concerns the scheduling of the conference call and the thoughts of Chairman Zatkoff prior to the call.
On Saturday, Justin Zatkoff, Chairman of the Michigan College Republicans, held an “unofficial” conference call. Zatkoff sent me an email, but this was also reported by Michigan CR.
In the email, Mr. Zatkoff described the call as so –
As a reminder, this is not an official board meeting, but will benefit everyone that is on the call tremendously in terms of informing you of all the details of the upcoming MFCR Elections.
A series of emails between Mr. Zatkoff and I suggested that he had several things on his mind prior to the conference call.
First, he was concerned about the University of Michigan not turning in a constitution. This concerned him for two reasons. First, Mr. Zatkoff received 50 votes from U of M in 2007. Without a constitution, U of M can’t be credentialed, in which case Mr. Zatkoff loses lots of votes. Second, Mr. Zatkoff was concerned that no matter what decision he made regarding U of M it would be spun by his opposition (Joe Sylvester), as unethical. In an email, Mr. Zatkoff articulated this concern:
If I charter them, Sylvester will say I’m breaking the rules to cheat my way to victory.
If I don’t charter them, Sylvester (I’ll make it clear that I don’t just mean Sylvester personally, I mean his supporters as a whole) will say that I’m disenfranchising an entire school that is going to vote against me (due to Emily Winter) just so I can win.
Mr. Zatkoff’s second concern going into the conference call (aside from U of M not providing a constitution) was Emily Winter’s candidacy for 2nd Vice Chair. Zatkoff’s concern centered on Ms. Winter’s claimed failure to comply with the procedure for declaring her candidacy. Allegedly, Ms. Winter filed her “candidate papers” 14 hours late. Here is what Zatkoff had to say on the subject –
Emily Winter, UofM student running for 2nd Vice Chair on Sylvester’s slate announced her candidacy AFTER the deadline. As stated in the constitution, you must announce your candidacy to the chair and secretary 1 month prior to convention. She announced 14 hours late.
However, Zatkoff is going to let Ms. Winter’s run “in order to try and keep the peace and get over this infighting…”
Explaining why, Zatkoff had this to say:
Emily announced at midnight of the same day the announcement was due (she was supposed to announce by 10am). However there may be grey area depending on your interpretation of 1 month prior.
Noting the difficulty of trying to please everyone with contentious decisions, Zatkoff ended an email saying:
…should be a fun conference call.
Topics: CR gossip, Michigan CRs |
January 7th, 2008 at 2:26 am
For what it’s worth:
It should be made clear that it wasn’t my decision not to charter them… the board unanimously voted on who to turn your credentialing information in to and at what time it was due.
They failed to comply with their own vote by not turning in their credentialing material in on time. It would have been unethical for me to break the rules the MFCR Board unanimously set just so UofM could vote.