While the Associated Students, Inc. is pleased the More than Numbers voter registration drive turned out to be a huge success, the fact that ballots had run out at the campus polling location is unfortunate.
However, it is unwise, presumptuous and wrong to blame the ASI for the shortage. In the Daily 49er story, “CSULB polling station runs out of ballots,” a poll worker is quoted as saying it is the fault of ASI for not telling students to register with a CSULB address so more ballots would be allotted to the campus location.
While it’s true the ASI did not tell students to register with a CSULB address, it is also true that registering to vote at an address in which a voter does not live is illegal. If the ASI had instructed students to use a CSULB address as their own if they did not live on campus, we would have been encouraging voter fraud.
But you would not have read that in the Daily 49er article.
The Daily 49er took an opportunity to shed a negative light on the ASI using absolutely no critical thinking skills or basic knowledge. The Daily 49er did not once try to contact the ASI before running the story, and instead took the word of a volunteer poll worker (not an election official) instead of contacting the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters office to ensure the poll worker’s claims were correct. Instead, the author took the word of one person and ran with it with no knowledge of federal election law, no attempt to get ASI’s reply and manufactured a salacious sub-headline that would guarantee an anti-ASI sentiment, no matter how ill-informed it was.
Journalism is not about getting the story out at all costs; it’s about getting the story right. This time, the Daily 49er got it all wrong.
– Christina L. Esparza, ASI Communications Coordinator
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