The victory seems to be the result of a very visible and creative campaign, aided by the pair's heavy postering, which brought them close to the EC's spending limit and got their name out to voters.

Now the EC seems unclear about whether the Driskell-Burton ticket actually exceeded this limit. This ambiguity and the EC's questionable response have fueled speculation on the council that the ticket should have been disqualified from the race.

According to rules posted on the EC Web site, spending more than $100 should immediately result in disqualification from the race. The only way a candidate can exonerate him or herself after exceeding the limit is if it was exceeded by the payment of penalty fines imposed by the EC.

For almost 24 hours after the election, four EC members said that Driskell and Burton had exceeded the spending limit.

But EC members say they were unaware of the actual wording of the rules. At first they said the campaign was allowed to return enough materials to bring them back under the $100 limit.

"The rules are pretty clear that two of the expellable offenses are overspending the campaign limit and any ad-boardable offense," said current council president Noah Z. Seton '00.

The day after the election results were released, under heavy interrogation from council members and other candidates, EC representative David L. Levy '00 changed his story.

Despite his previous claims, he said that Driskell and Burton were not over the spending limit. Rather, he said, all the EC members had been confused after a long and stressful night of tabulating election results.