What Is The Mystery Information NDSU Officials Won’t Release On The Petition Fraud

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Written By:
Rob Port

Sep 11, 2012
11:25am

By way of justifying their decision not to suspend 10 current football players charged with forging tens of thousands of signatures on petitions for two initiated measures NDSU officials gene Taylor and Craig Bohl have begun alluding to information about the situation which they cannot make public yet:

Bohl also indicated not all is known about the situation involving 13 current or former players who are accused of signing a name other than their own to an election petition.

“There is still information coming out, information I have that is not out there that I cannot comment on,” Bohl said. “I do think it puts to bed as far as the suspension question. That has been resolved.

The players have admitted to being complicit in the scam.  It’s hard to imagine what sort of information could change the level of culpability the players have for that.  But I wonder, was the involvement of the sponsoring committees in the fraud farther reaching than we thought?  Are Bohl and Taylor alluding to the possibility that the players may have been victims of the companies that hired them and/or the sponsoring committees for the measures?

We know that there is some question about the signature quotas that were required of the players, and whether or not those quotas broke the law (paying per signature is illegal).  Maybe that’s what Bohl and Taylor and alluding to.

If they are, it hardly seems like an excuse for the players.  Even if they were part of a scheme devised by those who hired them, they still had to know that signing their names to petitions they didn’t work on was breaking the law.  That’s still a major issue worthy of suspension, even if the NDSU officials are more worried about winning football games than accountability.