The UCSB student body was notified yesterday via e-mail that defeated 3rd District Supervisor candidate Steve Pappas has subpoenaed the university for the “names, resident addresses, dates of birth and citizenship of all students, undergraduate and graduate, enrolled at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008.”

The e-mail, signed by the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Michael Young, informed students of the subpoena, first filed Jan. 13 in connection to the California Superior Court case Steven Pappas v. Doreen Farr, and provided a link to the document. The subpoena also mandated the university give all “records pertaining to the UCSB Campus Democrats, Associated Students and any other individuals, groups or organizations that conducted voter registration drives.”

The e-mail provided a link for any student wishing to object – which over 300 students did in the first hour, according to someone close to the matter.

The subpoena is the most recent development in a legal attempt by Pappas to invalidate half of the approximately 9,000 newly registered voters in Isla Vista and UCSB. Pappas claims that minor errors on the voter registration forms, coupled with the mishandling of said forms by those running the registration drives, should discount the votes. If the court finds in his favor, Pappas will win the supervisor seat by about 2,250 votes.

Doreen Farr, buoyed by strong student support, won November’s election against Pappas by 806 votes and was sworn in as supervisor earlier this month.

According to Pappas’ lawyer Jeff Lake, the university records compiled from the subpoena will be used to cross-reference names and addresses as recorded by the county registrar’s office.

“We issued a subpoena for the enrollment records of all students,” Lake said last week, shortly after the university was served. “We are looking to see the UCSB records showing who’s enrolled and where they live, and we’ll compare that to the records given to us by the county registrar’s office. We want to make sure people are who they say they are and live at the addresses they said they lived at.”

The e-mail sent to the student body stated that students who wish to block their information from being released for review have 10 days to serve a written objection to both the university and Pappas’ legal team. A link to the necessary form was provided in the e-mail.

“Unless… by February 9, 2009, you serve upon the University and the requesting party’s attorney written objections,” Young wrote in the e-mail, “the University intends to forward to the requesting party…the names, addresses, dates of birth and citizenship of all students.”

Young said in the letter that the university is seeking to legally ensure that the records are used only in relation to the Pappas v. Farr case.

“The University is in the process of obtaining a court order that will limit the use of any personally identifiable information provided by the University to this litigation only,” he wrote.

As the university is involved in litigation, all Associated Students and UCSB officials have been ordered not to speak to the press, and the A.S. Legislative Council meeting was closed to the public while the matter was discussed in depth.

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