La Voz staffer logged into MyPortal, OK’d senate candidate to vote for him

During election week, recently reinstated senator Chung Heng Lee approached me about voting. He asked me questions about the DASB Senate voting and if I knew the candidates that were running.

I told him that I had not voted because I don’t like to vote, and since I don’t vote, I had no idea who was running.

He informed me that he was one of the students who was running for senator. He asked me if it was OK for him to give me a pitch about why I should vote for him.

I accepted and let him pitch.

As soon as he was done with his pitch, he asked what I thought, and I told him that all those were good points and I would like for all of those change to be made. I also told him I would vote for him. I wasn’t really going to vote.

That’s when he brought out his phone and asked if I didn’t mind if we could sign in to my MyPortal account and vote for him on the spot.

At first I was stunned and had no idea what to do, but he kept asking for my student ID. I didn’t feel comfortable putting my student information on his phone so I told him we could vote through my phone.

So I logged in to MyPortal and asked what’s next. He took my phone and opened the voting menu. He pointed to his name and asked me to vote for him right then.

I voted. He walked away a happy man.

To me, that was a very awkward situation. I have never voted for anything in my life and here comes this guy kind of forcing me to vote.

His pitch was actually pretty good. He said that if he was elected, he would push to change the library hours. The hours at the library don’t work well for some of the students, especially during finals, he said. So having hours like the Martin Luther King Library at San Jose State University would be one of his goals.

He asked how I felt about the school’s Wi-Fi, saying that another thing he would change on campus was the school’s Wi-Fi because it was too slow and that he would like to make it more secure.

I could have easily said no, but in that situation he seemed very desperate and I really wanted to get rid of him so I did what he asked.