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So it looks as though Ray Redlingshafer is the MUSG President Elect. Today Ray with his running mate and EVP elect Kathleen Blaney defeated Giuseppe Pappalardo and Billy Doerrer by a very close margin. Ray and Kathleen were elected with 51.1 percent of the vote. After a penalty of 5% for violating campaign rules Pappalardo and Doerrer received 42.6% of the vote.

Redlingshafer and running mate Kathleen Blaney, a College of Nursing junior, filed a complaint charging that Billy Doerrer, Pappalardo’s running mate, sent an unsolicited text message in violation of campaign rules. According to the complaint, Doerrer, a College of Arts & Sciences sophomore, sent the following message to a friend of Blaney last night: “I voted for Giuseppe Pappalardo and Billy Doerrer today. You should too at musg.mu.edu/vote. Pass this on to at least 5 friends.”

The complaint also alleged other past infractions on the part of the Pappalardo-Doerrer campaign, including mass emails and Facebook messages.

Doerrer also filed a complaint, alleging three members of his campaign received a similar text message in support of the Redlingshafer campaign, stating: “Hey everyone if you haven’t voted yet be sure to vote 4 Ray and Kathleen. They r both great people. Also if you r an engineer vote for Scott Emerson.”

According to the complaint, the text message was sent by Brad Kwaterski, a sophomore in the College of Engineering. Blaney said Kwaterski has no affiliation with the Redlingshafer/Blaney campaign.

According to the MUSG Web site, MUSG election rules stipulate that candidates and their campaign committees may not distribute “unsolicited mass e-mail or electronic messages.” In addition, “solicitation of votes by direct or indirect mailings (electronic or otherwise) or phone calls of any kind” is prohibited.

There is a process that all of this will go through before the election results are official. All other election results can be found here. There is also an oppertunity for students to join various all university committees…which are more specific to smaller areas inside the Marquette Community.

Secondly there is this whole mess that was the Tribune article claiming a conspiracy that Kappa Sigma guys have taken over MUSG. I’ll let the comments on the Trib webpage about Kappa Sigma being a leadership fraternity stand alone given that is it’s a whole argument in itself. I really don’t know where to begin with this, because there are so many issues that are inevitably raised without even explaining that the article is suspicious to begin with. First of all, the article could have been better done if someone wanted to look at the amount of Greek students involved in MUSG, not just Kappa Sigma, because there are a lot, and it’ll be harder to find non-Greek students involved. Apparently it’s near impossible to find someone willing to be interviewed for the article that isn’t Greek. Going off this point, I really don’t care about the amount of Greek students in MUSG because all of them are pretty smart, competent individuals that will listen to all their constituents and their needs. Whether or not they are Greek, there are a lot of good senators in MUSG (no bs). It’s also easy to see that legislation can’t be slanted towards the Greek Community and on top of it there is Kappa Sigma voting block, or any Greek voting block for that matter that could block legislation. In fact, though I’d have to look back at the minutes, but I highly doubt there have been more than 15 votes against all the pieces of legislation that have been written, so that really canceled all that out.

Finally there is one specific thing that I would like to make a note of from the article.

As the senior-most member on the committee, Pappalardo said he believed he would naturally be the one to fill the position. But instead, the position was given to a Kappa Sigma pledge, College of Business Administration sophomore John Giel, who had only one semester of Senate experience.

The reason why Giuseppe was passed up in favor of John Giel was because Giuseppe was already chair of the ad-hoc committee and MUSG likes to offer leadership positions to as many students as possible.

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