As Democrats and Republicans faced off in heated battles across the nation, Dartmouth's chapters of the College Republicans and College Democrats also went head to head in a he-said, she-said battle of alleged campaign foul play on Tuesday.
Hanover Police stopped students writing campaign messages for now President-elect Barack Obama on the sidewalk in front of the Hopkins Center for the ArtsTuesday morning, according to Hanover Police Chief Nicholas Giaccone. The students, volunteers for the College Democrats, did not have permission to chalk the town sidewalk, Giaccone said.
The police did not make any arrests or file a report, according to David Imamura '10, president of the Dartmouth College Democrats.
"I haven't confronted the [College] Republicans about this because I thought it would be unnecessary in the Election Day climate," Imamura said.
Jennifer Bandy '09, president of the Dartmouth College Republicans, said the College Democrats have violated numerous campus policies in their campaign efforts.
"It is completely unacceptable," Bandy said in an interview with The Dartmouth. "The administration should take action ... I have been severely disappointed in [the College Democrats'] commitment to fairness and their commitment to College policies because those policies are there for a reason, and for the College Democrats to completely blatantly ignore them and think they can get away with it demonstrates a huge problem with the political climate on this campus. The College Republicans play by the rules."
The College Republicans will discuss these issues with the administration after the election, Bandy said.
Several students accused members of the College Republicans of removing Obama paraphernalia from locations on campus. According to Sasha Otero '10, Bandy was tearing down Obama posters and stickers from Lord Hall Tuesday around 5:30 a.m.
Otero, who is not affiliated with a campus political group, was working in her room when she heard paper ripping in the hallway, she said. Upon entering the hallway, Otero saw a female student holding torn Obama posters. Otero asked the student what she was doing, and said could only understand the words "school policy" from the student's response. She said she assumed that the student was an undergraduate or graduate advisor. The student left untouched Vote Clamantis literature and issues of The Dartmouth Review that were previously distributed, according to Otero.
When Otero saw that Obama campaign paraphernalia had been thrown in the garbage on multiple floors of her residence hall, she sent a campus-wide e-mail explaining what she saw and encouraged students to vote for Obama, Otero said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
"The person who put those thing up didn't get their voice heard," Otero said. "I thought, 'Tomorrow's the election, and people should know what's going on.'"
Otero later confirmed that the student was Bandy through online photographs. She has received more than 40 responses in support of her campus-wide e-mail, more than 30 of which have been negative, she said.
Members of the College Democrats also saw Bandy and Greg Boguslavsky '09, chair of the New Hampshire College Republicans, removing Obama posters from the windows in Novack Cafe, according to Tay Stevenson '10, secretary of the College Democrats of America. Stevenson did not see Bandy and Boguslavsky removing posters himself, but confirmed that other College Democrats did.
Placing posters on the Novack windows is against College policy, according to Stevenson. Leaving pamphlets and posters in residential halls is also against policy, but it is a tactic used by both political organizations, Stevenson added.
Bandy could not be reached for comment regarding these accusations. In an earlier interview with The Dartmouth, she said that conservatives face discrimination on campus.
"I feel students have shown complete disrespect for the two-party system," she said. "Students are willing to treat the College Republicans in a way they wouldn't treat any other group on campus. If the things that happened to the College Republicans happened to any other group on campus, there would be another 'rally against hate.'"
At polls near other universities across the country, some students faced obstacles when trying to cast their votes.
At Lincoln University, a historically black university outside of Philadelphia, students waited for up to 11 hours, staying past the 8 p.m. closing time, according to CNN. Five voting booths were intended to serve a precinct with 3,000 voters.
"Practically the entire school was out there," Jacintha Johnson, a freshman at Lincoln, told CNN.
At George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., an unknown source sent a phony e-mail to students "saying Election Day had been moved to Wednesday," MSNBC reported.
"I am sure everybody realizes this is a hoax," Provost Peter Stevens wrote in an e-mail to the student body, MSNBC reported. "It is also a serious offense and we are looking into it."
