The same voting guide, all co-defendents, yet Miranda was tried first and acquitted. The next candidate was acquitted too, until the commission, without any new evidence, voted again. This time he was guilty. So was everyone after him. Only Miranda walked out clean.
Section 40 of the AS Elections Code governs what student organizations may do during a campaign. On paper, it does not say anything about who counts as a "student organization." Nothing in the text limits the term to any particular registration status.
The Electoral Commission had decided otherwise. In candidate trainings, in office hours, and in the informal guidance the commission hands out to campaigns before the cycle begins, commissioners had told students the same thing for years: Section 40 applied only to Registered Student Organizations, or RSOs, the groups that have completed the formal recognition process through UCSD's Student Life office. Anyone else, the commission had said, was outside Section 40's reach.
That interpretation did not come from the code. It came from the commission itself. It was, in effect, a rule the commission had written for its own use and then taught as though it were binding law. Candidates planned around it. Student organizations planned around it. And when a complaint was filed against one candidate based on a voting guide published by Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that is not an RSO, the commission's own interpretation seemed to answer the question before it had been asked.
Section 40 applies only to RSOs. SJP is not an RSO. Under the commission's own guidance, the SJP voting guide, which is at the center of nearly every Section 40 charge this cycle, was outside Section 40's scope.
The first candidate tried under Section 40 for appearing on the SJP voting guide was Ricardo Miranda. The commission applied its own rule. SJP was not an RSO. Section 40 did not reach him. He was found not guilty.
No one filed a motion to reconsider. The vote was recorded, and the hearing moved on.
Simpson's case came next. The evidence was the same voting guide, brought under the same section of the code. The commissioners were the same seven people who had just acquitted Miranda. They voted, and by a 4–3 margin they reached the same conclusion they had reached minutes earlier: not guilty.
The next case was about to begin. And then, without warning, someone moved to reconsider.
A motion to reconsider is rare, but it is a way to return to a decision when new information has come to light or an obvious error has been made. That is not what happened here. No new evidence was introduced. No overlooked argument was raised. Nothing about the record had changed in the minutes since the 4–3 vote. The motion itself was the event.
The seven commissioners who had just applied their own RSO-only rule twice in a row were now asked to vote again on whether Simpson had violated a section of the code they had already decided did not apply to him. This time the arithmetic came out differently. Simpson was found guilty.
Nothing was said, on the record, about Miranda's acquittal, decided under exactly the same standard, in the same room, earlier that afternoon. No one moved to reconsider it.
Simpson's reconsidered conviction became the template. Every candidate who came after him, charged under Section 40 on the basis of the same SJP voting guide, was found guilty. The RSO-only rule, which the commission had taught as if it were settled, simply stopped being mentioned.
Miranda is the only candidate this cycle who was acquitted under Section 40 and allowed to stay acquitted.
If Section 40 really does reach organizations that are not RSOs, which is what every conviction after Simpson assumes, then Miranda's acquittal should never have stood. The commission could have reconsidered it, exactly the way it reconsidered Simpson. It did not. If, on the other hand, Section 40 is limited to RSOs in the way the commission had said for years, then Simpson's conviction and everything that followed were decided under a rule the commission had just abandoned without explanation.
There is no version of the code under which those outcomes sit comfortably together. Either the rule the commission taught was wrong, in which case Miranda should have been tried again; or the rule was right, in which case everyone after Simpson should have walked.
That is the question the record does not answer. The same body that flipped Simpson's acquittal, and then convicted every candidate who followed, left Miranda's acquittal untouched, even though it rested on a standard the commission spent the rest of the afternoon refusing to apply.