Universities are places of learning, where students expand their academic knowledge while also making life mistakes.
The Conservative Party will be hoping their student committee at St Andrews University is getting it all out of their system now, after it was found guilty of electoral fraud.
It follows reports in June of large-scale wrongdoing in the UK party. The Electoral Commission has launched an investigation into those claims.
In Fife, the university’s students association upheld allegations made against the St Andrews Conservative and Unionist Society committee.
It had been claimed that people who had not paid membership fees, and were therefore ineligible to vote, had cast ballots after being invited by the young Tories to do so.
Pia Szabo, the students association’s societies officer, told The Saint student newspaper: “There were some accusations of election fraud and it ended up being true. So, in short, people were… stacking candidates, having people vote for candidates – and those people hadn’t been members [of the society].”
He added: “There was evidence of people being invited to the [AGM] who were not paid members and weren’t even being charged membership fees so obviously that was not OK.”
Ms Szabo also confirmed that the society had been told to re-hold the AGM, this time under closer scrutiny from the students’ association.
Earlier this year, a member of the Conservative Society committee told The Saint that the committee had been “cleared of all wrong doing.”
Ms Szabo said this claim was “not correct.”
The executive committee of the Conservative Society said: “The correspondence from The Saint was the first the society had heard of the existence of any such investigation or its conclusions.
“The association has not been contacted by the union regarding this matter since May.
“We were greatly surprised that the students’ association had seen fit to inform a student newspaper of its decision without making any contact with the society in question.
“We have since contacted union who have subsequently confirmed that they had come to this decision and they have also apologised for this miscommunication.
“While we feel it is unjustified, we respect their right to request that an affiliated society hold a new AGM.
“We shall set a date for the new AGM in due course and will work closely with the students’ association to ensure that the process is transparent.”
The Scottish Conservatives declined to comment.
