A strategy once in violation of the USG Elections Code led to a victory for 2026 senatorial candidate Zehran Muqtadir.
Muqtadir, a sophomore public policy major, sent out a campaign email to students encouraging them to vote for him in the 2026 Undergraduate Student Government Elections on Feb. 22. The voting period ended that same night at 11:59 p.m.
He was reelected to the USG Senate on March 3. He has served as a USG senator since spring 2025. During his previous campaign, Muqtadir did not employ the mass emailing strategy, he said.
Muqtadir said he sent roughly 1,800 emails to students individually by finding public lists, such as specific school Dean’s Lists, compiling them in an Excel spreadsheet.
He said he also got some names off the “no bid” list from the University Park Interfraternity Council from Spring recruitment and from group chats that he is in. After compiling as many names as he could find online, he sent out emails individually, one by one.
Article VIII, “Campaign Period Rules” section A.3. of the USG Elections Code states that, “Mass messaging via departmental listservs or university-maintained systems (including Slack, Blackboard Discussions, non-RSO, newsletters, etc.) is prohibited.”
In 2020, after two members of USG made a formal complaint, the winning USG presidential ticket, Truman Fritz and Rose Ritch, were unanimously found guilty of violating the USG elections code by mass emailing.
According to the Elections Commission’s decision, the candidates were banned from “in-person campaigning for the remainder of the voting period,” and asked to publicize “a way for recipients to inquire about how their emails were obtained.”
Fritz and Ritch employed tactics similar to Muqtadir’s, compiling lists of emails from on-campus organizations with which they were affiliated.
At the time, they did not use any departmental or university-maintained listservs, so they did not believe they had violated the elections code, Fritz said in a statement to Annenberg Media.
USG Chief Justice Ryan Tung said that no formal complaints against Muqtadir were raised through the formal complaint process, which closed 24 hours after voting concluded. As such, he said that the judicial council can not “retroactively investigate this matter.”
The only negative response to his email that Muqtadir said he saw was a discussion on a post on the social media app Sidechat.
“People were discussing whether or not to take this email seriously. And then somebody commented, ‘I’m not trying to get my inbox spammed. Don’t vote for him,” Muqtadir said.
Only after sending the emails did he become concerned about a possible violation of the code, Muqtadir said. However, he felt confident in his knowledge of the code and double checked to ensure he had not violated it in any way.
He said that parts of the USG Elections Code are “somewhat open to interpretation” as some of the terms used are vague. Email is not explicitly listed as an example of a “university-maintained system,” so he believes he did not violate the Code.
“There’s no explicit statement that says email is one of these university-maintained systems that are considered [violations],” Muqtadir said. “If it is, then I feel like that would be one of the things that you’d want to state out in plain English in the elections code.”
He also said he wouldn’t consider his action a mass email because he emailed each student individually one time.
“I think when I’m emailing individuals, one-on-one, that isn’t really a mass email,” Muqtadir said. “The scale of how many people I’m emailing shouldn’t necessarily factor in that — whether I’m emailing 10 people, or whether I’m emailing 1,000,” Muqtadir said.
He was the only candidate who employed this campaign plan, though he said that if many candidates were to use his strategy, it might not be well received by students in the future.
“With one candidate emailing people, you’re not being inundated with emails. And so I don’t know if I’d consider that spam,” Muqtadir said. “But I do see in the future that there might be some consideration to be made on the part of the judicial branch of the elections code, because maybe people don’t want to receive 21 emails from the different candidates.”
However, Muqtadir said he received a few positive replies from students to the email and found it to be a successful campaign strategy.
“I think generally, sending out the emails, I felt like it was a net positive,” Muqtadir said. “I did get emails back from a number of students saying, ‘really appreciate your campaign, really appreciated this email, I voted for you.”