FULLERTON – The Troy High School senior who was suspended from school and stripped of his student-government post after he broke into a school database to reveal that a teacher altered election results is seeking to undo some of the discipline imposed on him.

Jacob Bigham, 17, and his parents have asked the Fullerton Joint Union High School District to consider expunging from his record his five-day suspension and reinstating him this fall as student-body vice president, in the wake of a public uproar over the way the district handled the election flap four months ago.

Bigham revealed in April that the candidates whom student-government faculty adviser Jenny Redmond named student-body president and vice president for 2012-13 weren’t the top vote-getters. He was immediately suspended for five days, stripped of his current post as student-body secretary and barred from assuming the student-body vice presidency that he’d won for 2012-13. Redmond continued teaching the student-government class for the remainder of the school year.

In an emotionally charged speech to the school board this week, Jacob Bigham said he was “disappointed and saddened” that he had become Troy’s scapegoat, and indicated that the ordeal had taken a tremendous personal toll and caused his grades to slip.

“I hope that, even if not now, at the very least we can take more care of students like me who, had anyone looked at my grades and saw my grades were slipping, maybe something could have been done,” Bigham, a Buena Park resident, told the district’s five elected trustees. “I guess that didn’t really matter until after, when it could be used against me instead of to help me.”

District officials did not respond to Bigham’s comments during Tuesday’s meeting, but they spoke with him privately afterward.

“I think elections are sacred,” district trustee Marilyn Buchi told the Register after the meeting. “I don’t think anyone should tinker with an election.”

District Superintendent George Giokaris emphasized Tuesday that he could not comment on Redmond, citing employee privacy, but confirmed that officials were reevaluating the entire situation behind closed doors and had spoken with Bigham about his request to reverse some of the disciplinary action taken against him.

Redmond, who did not attend Tuesday’s meeting, has refused all requests for comment.

Although she resigned as the student-government teacher at the end of the school year in June, Redmond continues to be employed full time at Troy as a special-education teacher.

Redmond likely was not formally disciplined. Last month, the Register filed a public records request to obtain all documentation on any employee who was disciplined in the incident. The Fullerton district responded last week by saying it had no such disciplinary records.

School districts and other public agencies are required to release employee disciplinary records in cases where compelling public interest outweighs an employee’s privacy rights, federal courts have ruled.

Bigham, an honors student who aspires to attend UC Berkeley, was punished by his school after confessing to using a faculty password to break into a school database, which he used to access and publicize the raw voting tallies.

Bigham has said he has no regrets over what he did, pointing out that his peers in student government long believed Redmond was tampering with the election results and that he felt the only way to definitively find out was to access the raw tallies himself.

“He was a whistleblower and the victim of the voter fraud,” one of Bigham’s most vocal supporters, parent Gilbert Nelsen of Irvine, told trustees Tuesday.

“If no action is taken and the Bighams grant me permission, I’ll … go viral on the Internet and we will take this to YouTube,” said Nelsen, who does not know the Bighams but whose own teenage son is a student-government officer at Tustin High School. “I will set up a legal defense fund, and I will file a third-person complaint against the ASB adviser with the (state’s) Commission on Teacher Credentialing. We are all citizens of this world, and we all need to do the right thing.”

Added Bigham’s father, David Bigham: “Some of these kids will be old enough to vote (in state and national elections) this November. What message are we sending?”

After the Register chronicled the Troy election controversy in a July story, school district officials announced they were reopening a full investigation into the matter.

At the start of the reopened investigation, the Bighams said they were fearful the district intended to impose further discipline on the teen, including barring him from using all school computers his senior year. Jacob Bigham wrote a letter to district officials July 25 urging them not to take this action.

“While I understand that, at first, this may seem like a logically necessary action and precaution, I feel that such a punishment would not be conducive to my academic success as a Troy High School student,” Bigham wrote.

On Tuesday, the superintendent confirmed Bigham would face no further discipline in the matter, including for a disparaging text message he sent to Redmond in April in which he criticized her “blatant disregard for others’ opinions” and suggested she still had “a few more nails to hammer into the coffin of logic.”

Bigham said he regretted sending the message.

At Tuesday’s board meeting, Bigham’s supporters included an aide to state Assemblyman Chris Norby, R-Fullerton, who urged district trustees to take swift action to ensure the incident wouldn’t be repeated. Norby is considering introducing state legislation in the coming months clarifying that election results, even at the high school level, cannot be altered.

“The way this was structured, the teacher suffered a temptation to alter the results of the election,” Norby’s aide, Chris Nguyen, told trustees. “Send a message that democracy should be respected, whether at the school level, the county, state or federal level.”

The superintendent said this week that the school district already has begun the process of clarifying in its by-laws that student-voting results must be honored. Student-government officers from the district’s high schools will lead an effort to rewrite their own constitutions as well, Giokaris said.

“We will be making recommendations for board policies ASAP,” Giokaris said. “We need to ensure this never happens again.”

Contact the writer: 949-454-7394 or smartindale@ocregister.com or Twitter: @MartindaleScott