KnightNews.com obtained the following transcript by copying it from http://www.thefineprintuf.org/2010/03/03/audio-test/ and cannot guarantee its validity or accuracy. We are pasting what was already published here, as part of a public form we are creating, so our readers can become educated on how the University of Florida’s student government controversy is developing, and discuss it in our comments section.
Tapes reveal Unite vote-rigging scheme
Posted on 03. Mar, 2010 by Travis Pillow in Campus
Below is a transcript of a set of audio files provided to the Fine Print by members of the Student Alliance. The recordings were taken by an anonymous tipster at a Unite Party meeting at the Theta Chi fraternity house on the evening of Feb. 23 – halftime in the student government elections. Members of the alliance played the recordings and distributed transcripts to the Student Senate on Tuesday.
The transcript was produced by the Student Alliance and edited by the Fine Print. Please help us fill in the [inaudible] portions by commenting on this story.
PART 1 – The Pep Talk
[James Tyger]:
All right! Listen up! All right everyone, we are getting this meeting started. Apologies for being late, we’re at a meeting with fantastic news. Out numbers are down, and that is what the elections commission has to say to us. Which means, means we are not where we need to be, okay. We are absolutely not on par with where we’re gonna need to be in order to make this happen. Now I know there’s some of you who are out there all day today, busting your asses sun up to sundown, but that is not enough. I need every single person in this room out there making this happen for us, okay. I’m up. I’m barely sleeping. A whole bunch of us: Ashton, Marcus, Virlany. Up, not sleeping. Busting our ass to make this happen.
Now I don’t know if you’ve seen these fliers. They’ve been plastered all around campus and all around apartment complexes, and you know what they are? This is what Ben Cavataro is up to while your sleeping last night, okay. He and his party are walking around apartment complex to apartment complex at one, two, three in the morning and beyond to get this out there. They have candidates, they have volunteers, they have people on the ground willing to put the time in, to put them fliers in apartment complexes at four in the morning. Now I cannot stand here, and I did not take this position, to get schooled by Ben Cavataro and the Student Alliance party when we are so much better than them. All right. I, I can’t even begin to explain how frustrated I am about leaving that meeting and hearing what our actual turnout was, what our actual results are for today.
I will not feel this way tomorrow. So I need every single person in this room to understand that this is not acceptable. So what we’re doing tomorrow, this is not going to work. So with that, Googs.
[Andrew Guglielmo]:
I don’t know if any of you know me, um, I’m actually on the ticket with some of you all. I’m Andrew Guglielmo. And more importantly, uh, I’m pretty fucking pissed off. So, ladies excuse my language but it’s gonna be filled with this. This kind of shit, and the ratio of twos that I’ve seen this entire election. Every day that I’ve been walking around, if you guys haven’t seen me, but I’ve been walking from corner to corner to corner to corner of this campus and seeing each and every person wearing a Unite Party shirt outnumbered by two.
Two people in green shirts have been compared to the one in the Unite Party. Now what the hell does that say about us? Does it say that we don’t care? Does it? Do we care guys? Do we, do we care? Cause all I see is people with little giggles sometimes and they look away. A little giggle to their friends, and then look away at someone else. Go engage people, that’s why you’re here. You wanna be a student leader? Be one! I’m tired of people thinking that this is an excuse. It’s not!
The excuse is you all. You all are not trying hard enough.
Hear it again. You’re not trying hard enough. I expect each and every one of you to be outside, to be handing somebody a flier, to be engaging somebody, saying, “Hey, have you heard about the Unite Party?” and to get away from your little clusters, from your little friendships that you have with each and every single little person that your standing next to some gate, somewhere in the middle of campus. Get out there in the middle of it!
That’s why they’re more visible. That’s why people know their names and not yours. Now I understand that some of you are candidates, and some of you are volunteers, and some of you are house reps. Trust me, I ran the campaign last year, I understand.
But that doesn’t mean a damn thing.
All of you know the platform. All of you probably have a Unite Party shirt. All of you have no excuse but to be outside getting at least 10 votes per person, and those people should get 10 votes for them. It’s exponential. It’s easy. Do it.
We’re going to break up, right here, real quick. Now that you guys may have your tails between your legs and you see my face is probably a little red. When you guys get into your groups, candidates, I expect you to be talking to Thomas [Hilton] and Naadira [Renfroe] about each and every second of your day tomorrow. You have less than 24 hours until nothing else matters, but the count. This is your election. This means just as much to you as it does to Ashton, Marcus and Virlany. Am I wrong about that? And volunteers and house reps, are you going to be the ones to let them down? Are you going to be the ones to just say, “Eh, there’s, there’s two minutes longer”, “Don’t worry, I’m gonna do my philanthropy right now”, or uh, “Um, I’m just gonna, you know, go hang out with my friends at Yoga Berry?” That’s for tomorrow, that’s for the next day. Tomorrow is for the party. I expect all of you to be giving your blood, your sweat, and your tears for it, tomorrow especially.
We have houses and organizations that are less than 30 percent of where they should be! Last year we were at 60 percent. What does that say about right now? I hope your scared, cause I sure as hell am. So whoever is going to be organizing where you are going is going, they’re going to be saying where you’re going next. But house reps, you better get on the phone. Get on the phone to the older brothers, to the older sisters, to the older people in your organization. If your having such a problem getting their, their people out to the polls? Get your big brother or big sister to call them up for you. That’s why you have these people. There’s no excuse for us not to win by 60 percent. We did it last year, we’re going to do it again. It all matters how much you people in this room care right now. That’s all I have to say to you. Listen up to where you’re supposed to go.
[Jordan Johnson]:
All right, house reps go in the back corner back there. Candidates are staying in this room and volunteers are in this corner of the house.
[Chairs moving]
In a phone call Wednesday, Guglielmo said that he was not present for any of the discussions transcribed below. An earlier version of the transcript had attributed quotes to him quotes now attributed to “Unidentified Male 3.” The Fine Print is continuing to verify the identities of all the unnamed speakers.
PART 2 – The Anti-Greek Conspiracy
[Unidentified female 1]:
All right, guys so [inaudible] not ok. You guys, please be quiet. Be respectful. First of all, if we call you guys at 8:30 in the morning, please pick up. If we call you any time during the day, please pick up, like we’re doing that so we can communicate [inaudible] and obnoxious when I have to call presidents because representatives aren’t talking to me.
[Unidentified male]:
Hey can you all quiet down a little bit back there please.
[Unidentified female 1]:
Please be respectful. I know this is not our jobs. I did it last fall. It’s stupid, it’s annoying. I know it’s retarded, like, you have to call your sisters, call your brothers, all the times like will you come out, do this, go vote, like listen guys, literally right now, numbers at the polls, we are going to lose by a landslide. I told you guys this is where we have 4,000 votes as a Greek community. Over 4,000 votes.
If we cannot win this election, then we have [inaudible] these Student Alliance, this is ridiculous, these people don’t have friends. Like you think I’m kidding, these guys don’t have friends. It’s not funny, like these kids are the kids that want to take down the Greek system. They don’t want Sorority Row buses. They don’t want Fraternity Row buses. They don’t want block special [inaudible]. They don’t want parking privileges that we have on Sorority Row where you get your house parking, or [inaudible]. They want everything gone for us. It’s not a joke, they want to see every letter that we have stripped away from us. They don’t want us to live the life that we have. I’m being serious, guys, like, you may not realize this now, you may not realize the impact of these elections, but this can alter every single way that we live.
[Inaudible] elections this year.
The executive ticket, we need to go out and support, we need to support our Senate too, because how we run this campus is through passing bills and getting certain things pushed through, and we’re not going to be able to do that if half of their people are in there and half of us, ‘cus then we do have to have them have these bills passed that we don’t want that are going to hurt us.
Please step it up guys, there’s no excuse why tomorrow each and every one of you has to have 100 percent. Like, there’s no excuse. [Inaudible] If you are below 50 percent, that’s embarrassing. You should be saying to yourself, “It is not hard to get 50 people out and vote.” It’s really not. You go before dinner, you go before lunch, you go in between, you go real quick to class. If I can do it in five minutes and I have a meeting every single time, if I have classes literally scheduled every single day at every single hour, and all these other things, then every single one person that I know should be out there too.
Unacceptable guys. This is embarrassing to not have our Greek support right now. [Inaudible] Sigma Nu, um, Delta Upsilon, and, uh, Chi Phi, Lambda Chi, you guys have 100 percent. Like, that’s amazing. You guys all did well. I applaud you. Everyone else should applaud them. That’s amazing, get out every single one of their volunteers, their brothers and members out. The rest of you, you need to step it up, like honestly, we need to step it up. [Inaudible] There is no excuse. [Inaudible] if you guys want to win… [inaudible]
[Unidentified female 2]:
Um, also guys, with, like, polling locations, please keep using drivers tomorrow. Um, get some volunteers that drive people that haven’t voted to the locations. Like, not going on campus or, like, the polling location that they have to go to is too far is not an excuse. Like, you guys should have at least one driver at every time tomorrow volunteering to be able to drive people back and forth to the polling locations. They are scattered around a lot and we just don’t want to have that be a reason why people aren’t doing well.
[Unidentified male 2]:
Also, like, it’s also true, like, one of my brothers or somebody’s sisters might have leaked like, “Steal the stickers because like the lady they were talking to wasn’t looking.” That’s not the point of why we have you fill the board up. We have you fill the board so that we actually get the votes, so keep that in mind if somebody comes by and puts stickers on it, like, you know, just to fill it. That’s not why we’re doing this. We’re doing this because we need the votes, so the houses that already did that, you know…
[Unidentified female 2]:
We know that you guys aren’t doing it. Just be aware that you’re going to have members of your chapters that obviously don’t care as much as you guys and might be doing that, so really, really, really discourage that.
[Unidentified Male 3]:
All right guys, um, I want to start off thanking Delta Upsilon, and Lambda Chi, um, and the other two fraternities, Sigma Nu and, uh, Chi Phi. Uh, DU and Lambda Chi, you guys were done, you know, halfway through the day and you made my life a little bit easier. Uh, so that’s the good. There was more good. Uh, Theta, you guys had that incentive of getting your girls a bottle, not too many sororities do that, that’s awesome.Uh, DPhiE, I know you had your baby pledge class that they couldn’t eat until they went and voted. [Giggles] That’s amazing, that’s what you need to do. So I applaud you all for doing that.
Um, now, now we get to the bad news, okay. I woke up, you know, 5:30 this morning, not a big deal, walked up and down the row, nothing too serious, didn’t see anything out there. I went to Enclave, Canopy, Woodlands, uh, I went to Estates, and Gainesville Place, and those stupid kids fliered every single one of those cars, and of course I took them down. So one, they pissed me off already because I had to wake up at 5 in the morning and ruin my entire day. I look like a bum, I feel like a bum. I feel miserable and shitty, I’m getting sick. So first off, I hate these guys.
Now, if you guys, like, I mean, I feel like, you know, you don’t really get it. They stole a ream of stickers today, so that’s why I took all your boards, just, not because I don’t trust you, just because you never know [inaudible] your brothers [inaudible] and I marked all, on all the slots you guys haven’t voted, because, uh, tomorrow, the [I Voted] stickers will be changing. They’re gonna be a different color, I’m telling you that right now. So you try and fuck with us, and you try and change the stickers, or keep the same ones and put them on there, we’re going to know. ‘Cus we’re not retarded, you know, we have the numbers from today.
Um, and, if this, if that shouldn’t scare you enough, I kinda want to tell you a little bit about the Greek system. Uh, I looked at the numbers from last year and I was comparing them, we are 700 votes down from the first day of last fall. Seven hundred votes down. Um, if you guys were on the Google Doc, which you should have been all day, and you checked, you know, we had twenty four hundred people come and vote today. You think that’s pretty good? Well, fifty eight hundred people voted. Where the fuck did we get those other people? I’m literally freaking out, because I’ve never seen anything like that. Like, if you don’t think that that’s a bad thing, then you should walk out, because this could be a catastrophe. We have the potential to lose it all, and we’re not going to lose it on my watch. All right? I need you guys to step up your game, big time! Houses: I mean, I hate calling people out. DG: you guys have the largest sorority and you guys are at, what, how much percent?
[Unidentified female 3]:
Twenty-four.
[male voice]:
Twenty-four percent. Um, Phi Delt, where were you guys? You guys have the largest fraternity right now in active members, you guys have… [cut off]
PART 3 – Voting Board
[Unidentified]:
[cut off]…thirty brothers. I wanna tell you, DU doubled you guys and they have a third of your brothers. So to put it in perspective, that’s awful. Um, [giggles] ATO[?], Chi O, uh, Delta Chi, Tri Delt, I mean, all you guys are in red right now, because you’re so low and you’re way down from last year. I can’t explain it to you enough how bad that is. We have a couple sororities, I mean, the sororities are really carrying it right now. Um, you guys are leading the way. You have, you know, six houses with over 100 people, which is great. But then you guys have, you know, like, frat stars, [inaudible] fraternties. What are you guys doing? We need to get out there. We need to get our people to vote. I know it’s annoying, I know its hard getting your brothers to go vote, but we have pledges. Okay, they have cars. Stop everything what you’re doing tomorrow, and get them to go vote first thing in the morning. I do not wanna be running around Sorority and Frat Row. I have a midterm tomorrow at six o’clock.
Like, this is the last thing we need to be dealing with during this campaign, and the fact that we’re down over 3,000 votes is scary. We haven’t seen anything like this in a while. You know, I hate to be hard on you guys, but this is what it comes down to. Um, tomorrow, it’s gonna suck. They’re going to pull shit out of their ass like they always do. They stole those stickers. You know they are going to be doing something crazy tomorrow. Um, I, I don’t know what yet. I’m going to be up at five in the morning again, and it, you know, it sucks cause I got a social tonight. I know a bunch of you guys do.
And, and this is what it comes down to. I do not wanna lose our way of life. It’s not gonna happen on my watch. So with that being said, fraternities especially, you guys need to get on the ball. I’m sorry, there’s no other, like, no ifs, ands, or buts. You guys need to get on it. You’re dropping the ball, big time. And you know, it’s a shame, because, like, we should be killing right now. There’s absolutely no reason, we have everything in line, people are campaigning their ass off, we’re doing fine out there. The candidates are the most qualified kids. The Reitz Union thing is going great, and these people are cheating. They are straight up double voting. They’re getting their little freshmen and sophomores to go vote in different locations. And, yeah, we’ll notice that like a week later.
But tomorrow, when the results come out, and we lose, we’re going to be like, “Holy shit, we just lost our way of life.” And everyone is going to freak out and everything before you is gonna fall apart. And that’s the last feeling I want. I mean, I can’t stress that to you guys enough. You guys should be going to be tonight freaking out. I, I ,I don’t even know if I can sleep tonight, like, I’m shaking right now.
Just when I saw that text from Arianna, the Supervisor of Elections, and she said, you know, “Fifty-five hundred people went to go vote.” And I saw my Greeks only came out with twenty-two hundred. ‘Cus I know we can get out, you know, a thousand more people from the community. I know [inaudible], cause they don’t come out that hard. I know, like, those numbers are coming out from somewhere completely random, and cheat, and fake.
And if we lose this goddamn election, uh, on my watch, you know, it sucks, it’s on my back, I know that, but like, I cannot let the Greek system down. You guys cannot let the Greek system down.
This is what we live for, this is why we pledge. Um, everything about it. This is why we run this campus, and we have been for the last century.
And the fact that we are on the verge of losing it is freaking me out right now. So with that said, protect your boards. Be on the ball tomorrow. Um, if you guys need help, let us know. If you guys need rides, let me know. I can coordinate pledges. Um, Naviv[?] can coordinate pledges. We have people man, that’s what we’re known for is having people, and we’re not using them right now.
Um, I don’t care what older brother, if he’s being a dick. I don’t care what older sister is harassing you and yelling at you and being a complete bitch. Get on the leadership of your house. Get on the older people that you trust to help you out. You’re not doing this alone, okay. That’s the last thing that should be running through your mind. Like I said, this is a stepping stool for you guys. You guys want to get ahead, and we gotta kill this election tomorrow. We gotta win this election tomorrow. That way, we can continue dominating this campus, continue doing what we want, and continue living the life that we live. I, I mean, I cant stress that to you enough. Um…
[Unidentified female 1]:
Here’s a couple things. Some issues that I personally deal with when I come across these problems with older brothers or sisters saying things, “Oh, I can’t vote, I have class all day,” or, “It’s a different location.” I call every single person on that board and I go, “What time is your classes?” And if they are at lunch, I drive them personally to that location. As their house rep, you need to do that. I’m sorry, it sucks. You have to be doing this all day, but this is what we need to do. If we need to bring the older brother or sister there, that’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to take them anytime tomorrow. You need to be up tomorrow at 7:30 cause the polls open at 8 and if someone needs a ride at 8, then you need to be up. I’m serious guys, we’re calling at 7 to wake you guys up. Be up. Do not go out tonight. It will piss me off beyond belief. If I find out you guys are out and then tomorrow you happen to sleep in, it’s not acceptable. That happened yesterday and that pissed me off. When [inaudible] weren’t returned when I called ten million times. That’s not cool, because this is how we lose elections. It’s by dicking around and thinking that we have this election in the bag, because we don’t.
This could be the first time that we lose completely an exec ticket and, uh, Senate slate. If you guys are chill with that and wanna go rage tonight and think it’s all cool, go do it, see if you guys can go do that in a couple weeks when everything’s destroyed.
Literally guys, please, like, go [inaudible]. If you have rides, I know my house. I’m going to start talking to girls in the IFPC[?], I’m gonna start saying, “I’m going to be there for rides.” You have a computer, [inaudible], or you know other people who have computers. Come do shifts. Like, rotate shifts. Like, have someone drive them for a few hours. And bring those [inaudible].
All of you guys have the polling locations. Its online. It’s at sg.ufl.edu/elections. It’s simple. Show every single one where they are voting. You guys [inaudible], let them give you an excuse of why they did not vote. There is no excuse.
I don’t care if they are 25 or 17, they are going to vote tomorrow. Whether they like it or not. Whether you have to drive them there [inaudible] while they are screaming and yelling at you. You are going to have to take it for tomorrow, suck it up and get me [inaudible], ‘cus right now they are beating us 2 to 1.
So, like, guys, this is so scary, because I’m in Senate. I see what these people do. It’s horrible, literally horrible.
Also, if you’re below right now, we’re going to call out names. If you are down, we’re gonna personally sit down with you and talk to you about ways we are getting numbers up tomorrow. Other than that, if you have 100 percent, thank you so much, you guys are doing great, you guys should know…
[Unidentified Male]:
Um, but wait, those guys that did 100 percent, again, again, congrats. But you know, like I called you and said, the job’s not over. Uh, I know I’ve been talking to Sean.
Um, like houses, you know, get five more stickers, you know, from your little freshmen that live in the dorms and whatnot. And you know, talk to the GDI’s [God Damned Independents] in the dorms, and get them to go vote, and collect their stickers, put them on your boards. ‘Cus like I said, we want over 100 percent. Um, that was my goal, and you know, right now, I’m rushing to get 80, ‘cus I’m freaking out right now. But for the most part, um, so like I said, job’s not over yet. Make sure you guys keep getting people to go vote. Um, with that said everyone can leave except for:
[Unknown female]:
AGR, Chi O, Chi Phi, Delta Chi, Tri Delt, DG, KD, K Sig, Phi Delt, FIGI, Phi Tau, Sigma Chi, [inaudible].
[Unidentified Male]:
All right, if you weren’t one of those houses [inaudible] you guys can go, and I’ll talk to you all tomorrow in the morning.
[Chairs moving]
Disclaimer: This transcript should be considered a work in progress. The members of the Student Alliance who helped produce this transcript do not attest to its accuracy or the identities of the speakers. The audio quality is poor, and if you believe something was wrongly transcribed or a speaker was wrongly identified, please let us know or say so in the comments.
