On Sunday evening the Cornell Democrats released their Student Assembly (SA) election endorsements. Problem is, their club constitution as of Sunday evening circa 10 pm explicitly prohibited SA endorsements.
Update: After this original article was published, the Cornell Democrats changed their website to reflect an amendment to their constitution on February 25th that permits the organization to endorse SA candidates. A member of the Cornell Democrats, Nate Jara ’16, explained that the organization’s “old website” (linked above, and the one still on the Cornell Democrats’ Twitter profile) was amended Sunday night to reflect the updated Constitution. The new website, under construction, does not yet have the constitution on it.
The Cornell Review, before publishing the original article, did not reach out to current executive board leadership in the Cornell Democrats for comment.
Update 2: The second publishing of this article indicated Cornell Democrats President Eric Pesner ’16 had not yet responded to a request for comment. Later that day, he did write back to the Review indicating, “The confusion from the website stems from the fact that we are currently in the process of constructing a new site. The old site has not been updated since that effort began. We should have the new website fully up and running in a matter of days. The old website was updated to avoid confusion after your story was published.”
Despite the prohibition that was ostensibly in place at the time–as far as the old website still in use indicated–the Cornell Democrat’s executive board announced the following endorsements:
A part of the announcement reads: “[B]oth candidates [Juliana Batista and Matthew Stefanko] have a clear vision of where they want to see Cornell move in the next year… Accordingly, the Cornell Democrats will not be making an endorsement for SA President. We feel that both Matt and Juliana would make excellent SA Presidents.” (Emphasis theirs).
The endorsement of Peter Biedenweg ’17 for Executive Vice President is due to his membership in Cornell Democrats.
Readers might recall the Cornell Republicans also endorsed Diana Li, Samari Gilbert, and Justin Selig. That group also endorsed a presidential candidate, Matthew Stefanko, and endorsed Emma Johnston ’16 for vice president.
