Recall petition rejected by council chair

A petition to recall the CSU executive has been rejected, and a petition organizer says he’s willing to take it to court.
Council chair Jessica Nudo has decided only 1,300 of the 3,600 signatures gathered on the petition to recall the CSU match the group’s membership list. This pushes the number under the required 10 per cent of undergraduate students needed to trigger an election.
Nudo also ruled the petition was not valid because it was not in line with new regulations for recall petitions, which were passed three days before the petition was submitted to Nudo.
Petition organizer Patrice Blais said he wasn’t surprised by Nudo’s decision. “It was to be expected, anybody who has seen her professional behaviour during the year knows what side she’s on.”
Blais said he doesn’t accept her claim that the majority of the signatures were invalid, and that he’s “going to take the next step.”
Blais said he will take his cause to a “functioning” CSU judicial board if such is his opinion of the group, but he hasn’t yet ruled out challenging Nudo’s decision directly in Quebec Superior Court.
In the ruling, which was e-mailed to Blais and elected CSU officials, Nudo wrote she had “generated an electronic database from [the] petition and compared it with the electronic CSU membership list.”
The petition had been scanned and submitted by e-mail, and a paper copy was also delivered to Nudo by bailiff.
Blais said he has questions as to how exactly Nudo generated the “electronic database.”
Nudo acknowledged she did not have the “time or resources to conduct an exhaustive review of the petition,” and said she had not yet received a student list from the university in order to check the petition against.
Blais said he was “extremely confident” his petition had gathered the required number of legitimate signatures and that a third party should have been asked to verify the signatures. “The university would verify it, if they asked.”
A group calling itself “Students for Democracy, Sustainability and Accountability” circulated the petition at the end of the fall semester. The petition was officially submitted to Nudo on Dec. 19.
E-mails to Nudo, who resigned Wednesday Jan. 14, have not yet been returned. More details to follow.

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