The Government of the Student Body held a special Rules Committee meeting Tuesday to decide on whether to continue with impeachment proceedings against GSB election commissioner Michael Gilbert, senior in mechanical engineering. The impeachment was ultimately voted against.

Vice speaker and senior in aerospace engineering Jeffrey Rothblum and speaker of the senate Jonathan Richardson, senior in chemical engineering, were the senators to request the impeachment proceedings. Richardson called the meeting.

Rothblum said the impeachment proceedings were brought up on the grounds of misfeasance of duty of the election commissioner. The charges were that Gilbert had broken three GSB bylaws.

The first bylaw cited states the election commissioner may only vote in a situation when the election commission is deadlocked. Rothblum explained Gilbert broke this when the deadline to declare candidacy was extended.

The commissioner acted by himself without conferring with the election commission, he said.

The second bylaw states the commission has the authority to make new rules as needed within the government law and that the new rules will expire after the election. Rothblum explained the deadline could have been changed, but Gilbert didn’t have the right to do it.

The third bylaw Gilbert was charged with violating states that the official ballot turned in to the Computation Center must be submitted and not changed two weeks prior to the election, which would have been Monday. This created a problem because the deadline to submit the signatures needed for presidential and vice-presidential candidates to get on the ballot is not until Friday, according to the GSB election timeline, which was approved by the senate.

Gilbert said he had made mistakes. Because of the technicality brought up over the weekend, Gilbert said he didn’t think he was changing the laws, just clarifying.

“I guess I shouldn’t have made the decisions,” he said.

As for the conflict with the due date of the ballots, Gilbert didn’t think it would be a problem, with the Computation Center saying it would be OK to change the ballot at the end of the week.

“I was assuming it would be OK to add or subtract,” he said.

After discussion, the Rules Committee concluded the mistakes were not made out of malice and voted not to continue with the impeachment proceedings on all counts.

After the impeachment was voted on, members of the Rules Committee and guests at the meeting discussed what to do about the situation now and next year. When no conclusions were reached, Richardson said it would be discussed tomorrow at the senate meeting.

Two new candidates declared their intention to run, but both have dropped out of the race.