How much could a tweet cost you? At the University of Maryland, try $500.

Monday, April 15th kicked off the start of campaign season for SGA elections here at the University of Maryland. This year the incumbent Go Party and the challenging Time Party. A note that the party names are meaningless beyond just grouping people together. They usually change every year.

As The Diamondback reported on Tuesday, April 16th, if the Time Party is going to unseat the Go Party this year, it will have to do so with severely limited resources. That's because earlier this month the Time Party was fined $500 because one of its representatives turned to Twitter to accuse the current SGA of illegally promoting the incumbent president before campaigning officially kicked off. That fine represents a whopping 25 percent of the Time Party's original $2,000 operating budget. Both parties start off with the same amount of money to spend.

This fine is an absolute travesty on multiple fronts. First, let's look at the chain of events leading up to the fine. The SGA allegedly began campaigning illegally for a Go Party candidate. So the Time Party turned to Twitter to call them on it, presumably to also raise awareness of the issue with the public. And instead of investigating the incident (no investigation is mentioned), the Time Party is fined $500 by the SGA Elections Board? What for? The Time Party committed no wrong.

And now to address the shear amount of the fine. The SGA Elections Board has taken away 25 percent of the Time Party's campaign money. How can the party be expected to mount a serious challenge to the incumbents with that big of a disadvantage? If the board absolutely had to punish the Time Party for bringing potentially illegal campaign practices into the public eye, which there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with, why couldn't the fine be more reasonable? A $50 or $100 fine would have sent a message without crippling the Time Party's ability to wage an effective campaign.

The worst thing about all this is that there doesn't appear to be any precedence or rule regulating the action the Time Party took. A commenter on The Diamondback's story researched election rules and found that the only time a $500 fine is permitted is for campaigning early. Does that mean the elections board is somehow classifying the Time Party tweet as early campaigning??? Last time I checked, a tweet trying to raise awareness of a potential violation by another party is not early campaigning in any fashion. If anyone should be at risk of being fined, it's the Go Party!

So if the Time Party didn't break any rules, and it did not, why the massively debilitating  fine? Simple, the Go Party runs the SGA right now and the elections board is surely sympathetic to the party and what it stand for. The elections board then found this tweet and stretched into a gray area of its election rules to cripple the opposition. I realize I might look like a conspiracy theorist to some but honestly think about it for a second and you will realize it makes a heck of a lot of sense. This story, which got almost no coverage on campus beyond a poorly written Diamondback article, is corruption at its finest.

Jimmy Williams