Open-meeting law violation foils student election at CCSN

Monday, May 1, 2000 | 11:25 a.m.

Future politicians at the Community College of Southern Nevada learned a valuable lesson about following procedures after a failure to do so nearly wiped out their recent student elections.

The failure to post a public notice for the April 14 student elections committee meeting resulted in that group's certification of the April 12-13 elections being deemed null and void.

Nevada's open-meeting law requires a notice to be posted at least 72 hours before public meetings.

However, the community college, on the advice of its legal counsel, scheduled a new election committee meeting for 3 p.m. Wednesday in Room 1681 on the Cheyenne campus to consider challenges to the election and certify the results.

"What we are doing is taking the election process back to the period before the votes were counted," Thomas Brown, interim vice president for student services, said today.

"Naturally, we would have preferred that everything had been done right, but a mistake was made. We all learned a hard lesson about the importance of dotting our i's and crossing our t's."

Brown said the most important thing now is to properly certify the results "so people will accept that the election was fair and that we can all live with the results."

About 1,000 students cast ballots last month to determine the student body president, vice president, secretary, treasurer and 11 senators from three area campuses. There was no problem with the balloting process, officials said.

At the subsequent meeting, action was taken to disqualify one of the candidates. Such action would have to be repeated Wednesday to become valid.

Karl Armstrong, legal counsel for the University and Community College System of Nevada, who recommended that a new, properly posted meeting be scheduled, said the ballots had to be preserved because the school's student government constitution "does not allow for repeat elections."