With election season currently underway in the United States one can barely turn on the television, let alone go on social media, without hearing some type of scandal going on. Be it super delegates, miscounted votes, purged voter rolls, or the state of Ted Cruz’s citizenship. Our election system is riddled with problems.

But we don’t have to look on a national level if we want to see election controversy. Just walk down to the student union building here at Diablo Valley College and sit in on any Associated Students of Diablo Valley College meeting.

During the ASDVC elections between April 13 and 14 were riddled with policy problems.

Let’s quickly go through them for you; first polling stations were partially staffed by members of ASDVC, even ASDVC president himself Wesley Xia was spotted working the polling stations — huge conflict of interest. Second: the Integrated Alliance coalition had fliers scattered around the polling place, with photos of their members who were running for office. Third: Daniel Pardo, a member of the United Students of Diablo Valley College coalition, was missing from the ballot even though he claimed to have turned in all of the proper paperwork.

What we need to see is a much clearer version of the election code. As of now, we can’t seem to get a straight answer from ASDVC members or faculty involved with ASDVC about violations that may have taken place during the last election. ASDVC board members, and Election Committee members especially, should be explicitly banned from serving as polling workers.

Moreover there needs to be a larger window to file complaints or discrepancies with the election process.  It seems as though once the election is underway, there are no ways for someone to submit complaints in a timely manner, due to the small two day window submissions. Two days is not long enough to gather evidence to substantiate a claim against ASDVC and who knows how quickly they will return with a message. The Inquirer’s own investigation into the matter took nearly a week.

But we have already gone over this in our previous coverage of the ASDVC election, the bigger question is why does it matter.

This may seem like a trivial matter to some students, but we can not forget that ASDVC gets to control a huge portion of the student budget. In 2012 for example with the Inter Club Council — which is funded by ASDVC — budgeted over one thousand dollars for a ‘Halloween Festival’ for students. That’s not chump change, and that’s only for a party. I’m not saying that parties and student activities should go away but ASDVC has a lot of pull and a large budget and we do not need it to be tainted. If they can barely get through elections without a scandal, then how can the student body trust them to get through a fiscal year without a scandal?

To clear these discrepancies, and put the student body at ease, we suggest a special redo election. This can be done if the ASDVC board gets a two thirds vote, or a petition with signatures from five percent of the student body.

It is crucial that we understand what went wrong with this election, so that we do not see these problems in the future. We should not be ok with the results of an election that has so many holes the Swiss might call it cheese.

We should petition ASDVC to hold a new election.