USG denied OSU Divest’s initiative from appearing on the USG 2024-25 presidency ballot due to alleged bylaw violations. Credit: Lantern File Photo
An initiative by OSU Divest was denied by the university’s Undergraduate Student Government due to violations of the body’s bylaws, according to an Instagram post by OSU Divest, Palestine Legal and Ohio State’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine OSU.
The initiative titled, “Urging OSU To Divest from Companies Profiting from Human Right Violations,” will not appear on USG’s 2024-25 presidency ballot, according to OSU Divest, a branch of Students for Justice in Palestine. The group said “all 415 digital signatures collected from a single circulator” — someone who distributes the initiative and helps collect signatures — were nullified due to a ruling by USG’s Judicial Panel.
As a result, OSU Divest fell short of the 1,000 signatures required for an initiative to appear on the ballot, despite their collection of 1,247 signatures, according to Jineen Musa, a second-year in health information systems and outreach chair for SJP.
In prior years, USG resolutions have been used by SJP and OSU Divest to call on the university to divest from companies operating in Israel, but Musa said now, the organization opted for initiative.
“This year, we wanted to create more of a movement and allow more students to voice rather than the General Assembly, so we decided to go the referendum route,” Musa said. “That way students actually are able to express their votes and it would be determined based off their wants rather than powers in the General Assembly.”
According to Mohammed Mubarak, co-president for SJP, the initiative calls upon the university to prohibit any investments in companies that “are complicit in the documented ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”
“This is something that we feel the initiative reflects the values and concerns within the Buckeye community, especially those who believe in promoting ethical business practices as well, who have respect for human rights on a global scale,” Mubarak said.
Musa said out of five circulators of the initiative, her signatures were deemed invalid due to the dissemination of the petition on Instagram.
“Their concern was that people were screenshotting that story and then sharing it and possibly putting my name down as the circulator, without actually seeing the story from me,” Musa said.
Musa said USG had given the organization permission to post the petition on SJP’s Instagram, which they did not find in violation of the bylaw.
“They brought up my example, without referencing that bylaw, and said that [my Instagram post] was in violation,” Musa said.
Musa said other USG candidates who were approved for the upcoming election ballot have shared petitions on social media to get on the USG ballot, an action she said nullified her signatures when she posted on her story encouraging people to sign the petition to put the initiative on the ballot that will feature USG’s upcoming candidates.
“They’re not applying the same rules to all the candidates that have applied because there are people that have been approved for the ballot that have used the exact same method to a greater extent than what we did, and that are not being penalized for it, yet we had our signatures penalized,” Musa said.
Musa said USG had cited a bylaw claiming that for a petition to be valid, it must have the name of the circulator on every page submitted in the formal complaint issued to SJP. However, according to Musa, USG admitted that the bylaw didn’t reflect well in the digital age, as it doesn’t translate to the digital collection of signatures, commonly done through Excel.
This is not the first time divestment has been removed from the ballot.
According to previous Lantern reporting, “Issue 1,” which asked “whether student voters thought Ohio State should divest — or cut financial ties — from companies complicit in Israel human rights violations and the occupation of Palestinian Territories,” was removed from the ballot in 2015 because OSU Divest’s petition “failed to have the name on all the pages, so the pages without the name were thrown out.”
Bylaws were called into question, with OSU Divest arguing that “the language USG cited in its election bylaws doesn’t apply to petitions,” according to the article.
The Judicial Panel disagreed, and noted “that other portions of those bylaws were followed correctly by the petitioners.”
The same bylaw called by USG against the current initiative was used in 2015 against OSU Divest’s initiative.
“According to USG’s Judicial Panel, for a petition to be valid, it must have the name of the circulator on every page,” the article said.
According to Lantern reporting from that year, after the Judicial Panel ruled to throw out the petition, the branch later sent out a press release admitting “the presence of procedural error in the handling of this case,” and said the issue could show up on a special ballot. This ultimately led to their impeachment, as the justices were accused of overstepping constitutional boundaries by calling a special election.
Three USG justices then resigned after being threatened with impeachment, in addition to the resignation of the 2015 chief justice of the Judicial Panel. In a letter of resignation from Andrew Braun, a 2015 USG justice, he accused the ballot petition of being “… stifled by larger organizations with wealth and power who were able to exert undue influence on members of Student Life and those in the Executive Branch,” and accused the organization of being discriminatory toward OSU Divest.
