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Unofficial M-Party slate on web

A slate of Michigan Party candidates for the Michigan Student Assembly and the LSA Student Government appeared on the Internet yesterday. And then it disappeared.

The page, filed by LSA Rep. Dan Serota on a personal homepage, provided a list of Michigan Party members and identified presidential and vice presidential candidates. The list named LSA Reps. Fiona Rose and Probir Mehta as the party's MSA presidential and vice presidential candidates, respectively, and Paul Scublinsky and Eve Madison as the candidates for LSA-SG president and vice president, respectively.

Rose and Mehta refused to confirm the candidacies.

"This is an unconfirmed thing," said Mehta, an LSA junior. "All it has is a temporary list of candidacies that we can't confirm because we haven't announced yet."

MSA Vice President Sam Goodstein said he was not aware of the page, but that the contents are not surprising.

"That's everyone's speculation as to what's going to happen so that's not a surprise that he'd put that on," Goodstein said.

The party has not finalized its slate and will not announce its candidates without a unified front, Mehta asserted. The deadline to file candidacies is tomorrow at 5 p.m.

Serota, a Michigan Party member, said the prototype page was the result of a homework assignment for a class on the World Wide Web, Honors 251, and wasn't meant to be interpreted as the Michigan Party slate announcement.

"It's not an official document and there's no link (to an official Michigan Party web site)," Serota said.

Serota said he removed the page when he learned that students were making technological and political connections to the document.

"I didn't want people rifling through my homework and making assumptions," he said.

Serota said someone had inserted "bookmarks" into a web page, linking it other locations and making the list appear to be the official slate.

Rose said Serota was testing a proto-

type of a Michigan Party web site being developed by the party.

"It's just a work in progress -- it shouldn't have been accessible," she said.

Mehta said the party plans to announce a Michigan Party web site when it releases its complete slate of candidates tomorrow for next month's election.

"It is not secret information; it is not information we intend to keep from the student body," Rose said.

The page also identified Marissa Horwitz and Yejide Peters, LSA sophomores, as candidates for MSA and LSA-SG, respectively.

Neither the Wolverine Party nor the Students' Party have announced full slates.

Wolverine Party presidential candidate Andy Schor said the Wolverine party's MSA and LSA-SG presidential tickets were added to the Wolverine web page after the party released the names.