The mudslinging began long ago &- confidential financialrecords were released, signs were spray-painted and posters weretorn down. You’d think the mudslinging would have ended whenthe Associated Students Inc. election results were announced at 4a.m. on April 29.

But as you should know by now, nothing in ASI is that easy.

Now Angel Barajas, the only red slate executive candidate tolose, is filing various complaints against Executive VicePresident-elect Chris Lange &- among them, that Lange forgedan invoice to stay under campaign spending limits.

If Lange used fake invoices, he should be removed from office&- that is without debate. But the entire blame for thesituation cannot be placed on Lange alone. This problem startedMarch 3, when ASI debuted “Honey! I Shrunk the CampaignBudgets.”

At that fateful meeting, the initial uproar concerned aPresident Peter Ucovich-authored change to the election codedisallowing slates to pool money for campaign items. The measurewasn’t a slate-killer on its own &- it just didn’tallow slates to take advantage of group discounts on plywood, paintor T-shirts.

President-elect Joshua Wood, then just a candidate andASI’s vice president of university affairs, said studentswould find loopholes to circumvent anti-slate rules. So Ucovich, inhis infinite lack of regard for students, launched a full-scale waron the slate system &- he presented an amendment banning logosfrom appearing on campaign signs, fliers or Web sites.

This ridiculous amendment spawned from the sour taste Ucovichgot in his mouth when he realized Wood was the odds-on favorite forthe presidency; unsurprisingly, Ucovich garnered enough blind,thoughtless support from the yes-men and women he has corralled inASI. For example, Nicole Croly, the director for the College ofEducation, spoke out loudly against slates on several occasions andaccused Wood of supporting slates only to fill selfish needs.Croly, however, ran on slates both last year and in this electioncycle; she also ran unopposed both years.

Despite this, Croly joined Ucovich’s UNITY slate in 2003and donated her allotted campaign funds to his cause. This year,Croly wore a pumpkin-colored shirt and stumped for orange slatepresidential candidate Julio Velazquez. Hypocrisy is apparently notjust a word to Nicole Croly &- it’s a way of life.

After Ucovich’s amendment officially castrated slates,Wood moronically tried to match Ucovich’s political savvy bytrying to filibuster the board. Wood introduced a measureridiculously lowering campaign spending limits &- and itbackfired louder than a 1980 Ford Grenada. Ucovich grinned as hevoted in favor of the measure (which Wood voted against). Themeasure passed, setting the table for the current controversy.

Thanks to those reforms, the election code is now a 30-page pileof crap that deserves nothing less than to be flushed. For all theoutrage over Ucovich’s plan to rename the University Unionand Wood’s Student Health Insurance Plan flap, the biggestpiss our student leaders took on students this year was theofficial destruction of slightly respectable elections on thiscampus.

Ucovich is gone from student government come June 1, thank God.But Wood has another whole year to screw things up. If he relies onthe garbage politicking that got ASI’s election code where itis today, the student government will crumble under him &-leaving you, the students of Sac State, trapped in the rubble.

One of Wood’s first moves next fall should be to blow upthe election code and start from scratch &- unless he wantsnext spring to end up like this one.