An administrator’s e-mail misstep has caused a political dust-up at Winston-Salem State University.
When the university’s interim vice chancellor for student affairs, Michelle Releford, got an e-mail message from a student about early voting for midterm elections in the county, with a request to forward it to the entire campus community, she did so. Without reading it first, a university spokeswoman says.
It turns out that portions of the e-mail encouraged students and faculty and staff members of the public university to vote for Democratic candidates. It also provided a link to the county Democratic Party’s Web page. “She didn’t look at it like she should have,” said Nancy Young, the spokeswoman.
Within a few hours on Monday, university officials sent out a retraction, asking students, professors, and staff members to disregard the first e-mail. In that follow-up message, administrators acknowledged that the original e-mail violated a North Carolina law against using university resources for political campaigning.
But representatives of the state Republican Party did not believe the retraction was enough and called for equal time. Feeling that they needed “to do something, even though it wasn’t the best thing,” Ms. Young said, the university sent out a campus-wide e-mail identical to the original message, but with promotional material from the GOP. Because that e-mail also violated state law, the university was forced to publish a retraction for the Republican-leaning message, too. “The second one was just as illegal as the first one,” Ms. Young said.
The Forsyth County Republican Party was still not satisfied. Nathan Tabor, party chairman, has called on the university to discipline the vice chancellor and to perform an audit of the university’s e-mail system to see if other partisan messages have been sent in the past. “The likelihood of it being just a one-time occurrence is slim to none,” Mr. Tabor said.
The Republican Party has also asked the Forsyth County Board of Elections to take Winston-Salem State University off its list of eight early-voting sites scheduled to open on October 25. Mr. Tabor said that voting sites need to be apolitical and that the university “has violated state law and has contributed in-kind” by sending promotional e-mails for both parties. “They have shown themselves to be politically active, which should make them ineligible,” he said.
The county’s elections director, Robert H. Coffman, said the university, which has been hosting early voting on its campus since 2004, simply provides a venue for voting. Closing the site will affect everyone in the surrounding community, he said, not just the university. “I’m confused on the logic on exactly who’s being punished,” he said.
The Forsyth County Democratic Party is pushing to keep the university voting site open. According to Cindy Burke, Democratic Party office manager, the voting site “doesn’t have anything to do with the students.” Ms. Burke said the party believes the e-mail “was all just an accident.”
10 Responses to Political E-Mails Spark Complaints at Winston-Salem State U.
panacea - October 21, 2010 at 10:13 pm
Partisan politics here in North Carolina have been particularly vicious. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this in the local paper yet.
doug1943 - October 22, 2010 at 5:26 am
I think the Republicans (and I am one) are overstepping themselves here.
Better to be gracious, accept the university’s attempts to rectify the “mistake”, and move on.
As it is, trying to shut down the university voting site looks like — and I believe it is — an attempt to limit student voting, on the belief that it will lean Democratic. A bad idea. We need to win students to our ideas, not disenfranchise them.
jausher - October 22, 2010 at 8:01 am
Both e-mails primarily consisted of a list of early voting places and the dates and times they were open. The partisan links at the bottom of the e-mails were inappropriate but not inflammatory. This was a case of simple human error–an oversight–by a dedicated university employee. Nathan Tabor should go back to asking his parents for more money to finance his next unsuccessful campaign and quit attempting to disenfranchise a community that has some historical perspective on what it means to be denied the vote.
suburbprof - October 22, 2010 at 8:25 am
The center’s shifted so far to the right in this country, elections simply decide which branch of the Republican party gets to set the agenda. I.e., both of the e-mails favored parties representing the propertied elite. If the university sincerely seeks balance, it will have to circulate political material from truly left-wing groups, as today’s Democrats are anything but that, despite what ultra right-wingers believe.
laurencejgillis - October 22, 2010 at 9:42 am
“Inadvertent”? Exactly how dumb do they think the rest of us really are?
I don’t believe the disclaimer for a minute, and neither should the adminstrators (or prosecutors) who review this incident. That electronic network is paid for by the whole community, not just the person whose thumb is on the “send” button.
If it were a Republican or a Tea-Partier who sent out that first e-mail, this story would have an entirely different slant, with all sorts of delicious slanders. As it is, however, even the first sentence of the story here is excusing the perp.
Larry Gillis (Cape Coral FL)
rlpeterson - October 22, 2010 at 10:10 am
Everyone really ought to just calm down. Even if the first email was deliberate, what practical difference did it make?
In my experience, the best way on a university campus to ensure your message gets ignored is to send out a mass email.
mccoyshelley - October 22, 2010 at 10:56 am
Both parties must have a low opinion of the campus community if they think one e-mail is going to radically change anyone’s vote at this point in the election process.
tbstoller - October 22, 2010 at 2:17 pm
This is a time to be gracious and say, “Thank you for your attempt to fix the error.” When I saw the title, though, I immediately thought of my (purposefully apolitial)college-student child whose name, email and home phone number were apparently sold by a student-run charity group at her university to the Democratic Party. The Winston-Salem State community can delete their email and forget about it–meanwhile, my daughter’s inbox keeps filling up and I keep getting phone calls.
larrycuffe - October 22, 2010 at 4:22 pm
laurencejgillis you commented: ““Inadvertent”? Exactly how dumb do they think the rest of us really are?”
I hesitate to answer your question as I fear my answer, based on your comment above, might offend.
I think Michelle Releford’s error is an error I might make. I get lots of emails and would tend to skim many of them.
greenhills73 - October 25, 2010 at 4:25 pm
larrycuffe – you might, but if a vice chancellor does it, there is no excuse. It’s one thing not to read the whole email; it’s entirely another matter to forward it as a mass email to the whole campus, and at the request of a student, no less…not the chancellor, not another vice chancellor, but a student. I find this appallingly irresponsible.