No violation found for Ohio State USG campaign accused of failing to report a ‘malicious’ domain name purchase

The Lantern gave an update on case I was following about an Ohio State Undergraduate Student Government (USG) campaign that was accused of failing to report a campaign expense.The campaign was found not to have committed a violation.

The expense was the purchase of a domain name “voteceliaandleah.com,” which whois record from GoDaddy showed that it was registered to an email address belonging to the Ahart-Tripi campaign manager Tim Lanzendorfer in November.

“There was a judicial panel hearing Tuesday about the case. The panel — which consists of a clerk of court with eight judges and a chief justice, who are all students — found that USG presidential candidate and current vice president Josh Ahart and his runningmate Jen Tripi had not committed a violation in a case brought against them by three other campaign teams.”

“The judicial panel has unanimously decided that Josh and Jen were not found in violation of falsifying documents submitted to the judicial panel. Therefore, no penalty has been assessed,” the clerk of court emailed statement, which was obtained by The Lantern Tuesday, said. The email also said the decision could be appealed.

“The plaintiff brief had alleged the Ahart-Tripi campaign team failed to report the purchase of a domain name “clearly meant to deter an opposing campaign.””

The defense’s argument was that the domain could have been a personal purchase made by Lanzendorfer.

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