Convicted for an "unclear" endorsement that the court itself admitted might not be one, under a "civility" clause that federal courts have struck down.
In the final week of the campaign, Yelkovan's team posted a short video to his Instagram Story. He appeared on camera alongside Oliver Ma, a candidate for Lieutenant Governor in a separate race, denouncing a political action committee the two of them opposed. Their campaign logos sat side by side on the screen, separated by the letter "x," a social media convention so ubiquitous that it is almost invisible on the platform. People use it to mark collaborations and joint appearances. It allows for names/logos to be shown together so people know who they are, but does not mean anything else. And it most definitely does not mean an endorsement.
A student named Ryan Coryea filed a grievance, Case 24, arguing that the "x" between the two logos amounted to a prohibited endorsement. But her compliant included a very different second count. She also argued for violaiiton of "civility" for lying about ecieving an endorsment from Ma. The story was so obviously not an endorsment, that even Coryea herself knew. She would not have included the second count if she truly believed it was an endorsement.
Yelkovan's team pointed out several things. The "x" symbol is not an industry term for an endorsement; it is used constantly across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube to denote collaborations of every kind. When Yelkovan had actually received an endorsement during the cycle, he had posted it as a permanent grid post, the durable kind Instagram archives on a profile, not as a 24-hour Story. And an earlier Story on the same account, a joint appearance with a UCSD social-media figure named "Yani," had used the same "x" format without anyone suggesting it was an endorsement. Yani, asked about it on record, confirmed the obvious interpretation.
There was also a textual problem with Coryea's argument. "Oliver Ma for Lt. Governor" is a campaign committee, not an individual. Section 39, which deals with endorsements between candidates, addresses people. Section 40, which deals with endorsements by student organizations, addresses groups. A campaign committee is neither. The provisions Coryea leaned on did not, by their own terms, appear to cover what he was complaining about regardless.
The Electoral Commission found Yelkovan guilty anyway, and he appealed to the Judicial Board, the body designed to check the commission when it strays. The appeal ran into a different kind of problem.
The chair of the Judicial Board, Sofia Early, is a close personal friend of Ricardo Miranda, Yelkovan's opponent. Yelkovan's representative, Daniel Negrete, raised the issue on the record. Early said that she would "lead the case" because other members of the board were inexperienced, but that she would recuse herself from voting. Both halves of that statement are unusual. A recused member cannot preside over the hearing she is recused from; the point of recusal is to keep her away from shaping the proceeding at all. When the vote was taken, Early was recorded not as excluded, but as "abstaining," a subtle distinction that still keeps a recused member on the scoreboard.
Early presided over the Case 24 appeal despite being a close friend of Miranda. She said she would not vote, and then was recorded as abstaining rather than excluded from the count, functionally keeping her presence inside the tally. Her rulings during the hearing framed how the panel treated Yelkovan's arguments.
The Judicial Board upheld the conviction, 3–1–1. The majority opinion, in a single passage, said almost everything worth knowing about Case 24:
American courts have, for more than half a century, refused to enforce rules that are too vague to give people fair notice of what is prohibited. When a federal court in 2007 confronted a university "civility" requirement nearly identical to Section 44(a), in College Republicans at SF State v. Reed, it struck the requirement down as unconstitutionally vague, precisely because "civility" is the kind of word that means whatever the person enforcing it wants it to mean.
The Judicial Board's Case 24 opinion does, in effect, the thing that doctrine is supposed to forbid. The board acknowledges it cannot say with certainty that the Story was an endorsement. It does not cite a rule that puts candidates on notice that joint-appearance graphics are forbidden. It simply decides that something close enough to an endorsement, on Instagram, is uncivil enough to punish. That is the definition of ambiguity being resolved against the speaker.
The case is also significant for where it was not brought. Case 24's conviction was not issued under the code's actual endorsement provisions, Sections 39 or 40, because those provisions did not clearly reach the conduct. It was issued under 44(a), the civility clause, which is now doing the work the specific provisions cannot. Across the cycle, 44(a) has become the fallback charge in cases where the rest of the code will not cooperate.
Case 24 was Yelkovan's second strike. Stacked against Case 13, which had convicted him for appearing on a voting guide that also listed his opponent, the pattern by this point was hard to miss: protected campaign expression reframed as a violation, tried before decision-makers with visible conflicts, and affirmed on appeal by a chair who would not quite step away.