Newly-elected USG President Tom Haggerty paused, then laughed, when he called the transition between this year's USG executive staff and next year's a "peaceful" one, knowing it had been anything but.
Shortly after Speaker Corey Schmitt called last night's USG meeting to order at 9:22 p.m., 4th-semester finance and actuarial science major Lucien Stroie, clipboard in hand, strode to the microphone and made his case. It resulted in Stroie's eventual removal by five UConn police officers.
Stroie, who recently lost the election for comptroller to Matt Burrill by 980 votes, held the floor for nearly an hour, demanding that USG release the voter rolls to confirm that there was no error in the election system.
Taylor McGloin, the president of the Student Government Assurance Team, spoke alongside Stroie during the hour-long ordeal. He said Stroie had not been arrested, a fact that the UConn Police Department later confirmed.
Though he left of his own volition at Wednesday's meeting, McGloin had previously been escorted by police from a March 18 USG meeting after refusing to follow the group's rules of debate conduct.
Currently, lists of which students voted for which candidates are not considered public information, but former comptroller Jason Ortiz said USG should figure out a way that elections can be verified, since "a process without verification is not a [legitimate] process."
"We have to know our elections are [legitimate]," Ortiz said, speaking on behalf of Stroie.
McGloin, whose group is applying for authority equal to that of USG from the Board of Trustees in the fall, said they merely wanted a list of each vote cast without the personal voter information.
Stroie used persistent, often confrontational tactics to further his argument. He noted that while the contract USG signed with the entity that counts the votes does not say the public is entitled to a voter roll, it does not say that they are not.
Former External Affairs Chairman Seamus Keating attempted to discredit Stroie by likening his request for a voter roll to the logic behind why Chewbacca, an 8-foot Wookie, lives on a planet populated by 2-foot Ewoks. Keating's argument was likely referencingan episode of the TV show South Park, where a lawyer wins a case by aggressively debated Star Wars rather than the issue at hand.
While no other questions mentioned Star Wars, most asked for insight into Stroie's motivation for believing there was a problem with the system, since "there has never been a problem with USG elections," according to Non-Traditional Housing Senator Meghan Perrone.
Stroie avoided the questions at first, stating that his motivation had nothing to do with his purpose at the meeting, but finally brought the state of national affairs into question.
According to Stroie, with "such bad mismanagement" in the state and national governments, a statement of transparency needs to be made at the university level if it is to be established elsewhere.
"I still haven't lost," said Stroie, asking that the Senate be suspended, so inaugurations could not occur as planned, which would set the election results in stone.
Stroie had earlier acknowledged that if he had won, he would have known that he had done everything in his power to succeed and that democracy had played its part.
But, since he had not won, he said he still had the obligation to do everything in his power to make sure that democracy was fulfilled.
As questioning became a heated debate and the meeting to lose all sense of order, Schmitt managed to keep the room calm enough to deliver a bottom line.
"This Senate does not have the authority to give you a voter roll," Schmitt said, backed up by Perrone, who said that while USG has jurisdiction over how elections are run, it does not have any say in how the votes are counted.
According to Schmitt, the policies in place regarding elections do not grant USG the ability to divulge the voter rolls, and that if the regulations are to be changed, legislation must be submitted for review.
With 10:30 p.m. approaching and the room slipping into disorder, Schmitt gave McGloin one final minute to speak on behalf of Stroie.
When McGloin ran out of time, Schmitt asked the two to leave.
McGloin left peacefully, but Stroie held his ground, refusing to allow inaugurations to go on as planned.
"You will leave, or I will have you removed," Schmitt said, to which Stroie replied calmly, "Please have me removed."
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