Election Concerns

PLYMOUTH-The votes from last week’s Student Senate have brought on a whole new body of senators, and an even larger pile of controversy. The Student Government elections were held on April 18, 19, and 20, and suffered some voting difficulties. Senate Speaker Sean Greenlaw stated on April 23, at the last regularly scheduled meeting of the 2005/2006 Student Senate, that these problems were “something that had never happened in the history of Plymouth State University.” There were two problems: the failure of the online voting process, and the later allegations of candidates infringing upon the laws of student elections.The first issue of online voting began when voting was opened on the Internet Tuesday, April 18. Concerns were raised almost immediately when it was realized that the voting was set up only to allow students to vote once from each IP address – meaning that only one person could vote per computer. There was no system in place to ensure that students voted for the correct representatives – all students had the ability to vote for all positions. In addition, once the IP issue was taken care of, the next problem that erupted was now there was no way to ensure that students did not vote more than once. Online voting was suspended very early on the 19th and later the decision was made to not count any of the votes received on the 18th due to the previously stated problem. The official results of the paper ballots are included in this issue. The best estimate of how many paper ballots were cast is 269, which is based on the number of total votes the Student Body President received, since everyone can vote for that position. There were also just over 300 online votes recorded that were discarded and not counted in the final election numbers. Dwight Fischer, Chief Information Officer at ITS explains, “Jeremy Foskitt (Student Body President) and I started working on developing the online ballots four months ago. It’s not a sophisticated survey tool, but it was thought that it would do the trick.” Fischer goes on to explain that the tool performed its trick a bit too well. “The tool was designed to isolate the address of the computer making the online vote. A computer that had already voted was not allowed to vote again- one IP address, one vote. So students who voted in a computer cluster prevented another vote from that same machine”. The restriction of the ‘one IP, one vote’ system had to be lifted so every student could use the computer clusters to vote. The result was that there was no way of knowing whether or not students had voted more than once. “Our mistake,” says Fischer, “was going directly from a paper ballot system to a large online voting system. We should have opened it to only a few computers. This is not much different than what many state governments go though. Everybody wants online voting. The difficulty is assuring that everybody only votes once.”To add to the problem, there was an incorrect message online informing students that if they had already voted online they were not allowed a paper ballot vote in the HUB on the following days. The conclusion from ITS was that there was no evidence of election fraud, but there was no way to assure the student body that no voting abuse occurred. These problems with the online vote were then followed by concerns in the paper ballot vote which was held on April 19 and 20. At the same meeting mentioned above, Greenlaw said, “Some of the concerns brought to me were that chairs of the election committee were on the ballots, that people who were actively campaigning for other people were working at the election table, and that people on the ballot were campaigning near the tables.” The Student Senate Constitution states in Article IX, Section 6 that “candidates shall not be allowed to campaign within 100 feet of the polling area.” Greenlaw went on to say that he made the decision to throw out the elections and have a re-vote. Greenlaw is allowed to make this decision based on Article IV, Section 1A, letter L of the Student Senate Constitution. which states, “Any duty that the Speaker of the Student Senate deems necessary and proper to carry out.” After much debate, former Junior Class Representative Andrew McLean put forth two motions – one to suspend Robert’s Rules of Order so that everyone in the room, even those not on or involved in anyway with Senate could vote, but more importantly his second motion: to overturn Speaker Greenlaw’s ruling and not have a re-vote. Heated discussion followed, but in the end the motion was successful and the Speaker’s decision was defeated by a vote of 16-5, with 9 senators abstaining. Two members of the election committee who were both present at this meeting had different options to voice. Former Student Body Vice President Kat Moitoza, who was not re-elected, thinks that, “Since the integrity of the election was being questioned, I believe there would have been a re-vote. This insures that everyone could be elected in a fair and equitable way.”Former Student Apartment Representative Nate Lord said, “The big issue to me is that there were lots of accusations and no evidence, and those accusations were not serious enough to warrant a re-vote since the issues raised could be dealt with on an individual level. It would not be fair to the student body or those who won the election legitimately. A re-vote was not the best solution.” Lord also pointed out that the way that this was handled within the Senate could be questioned. “I feel,” said Lord, “that the details (voting concerns) were presented to us poorly by the executive board. Decisions were made hastily.” Despite the frustrations of some, Lord says that, “Problems like this are unavoidable, but in the end Student Senate does a lot of good.”In reality, this was a very complex issue, filled with many opinions and disagreements. “I hope this issue gets more students involved.” says Lord. Including the discarded online votes, less than 600 votes were cast, meaning that only 15% of the campus, at most, participated in the elections. I have posted the portion of the Student Senate meeting’s minutes that correspond with this issue at oz.plymouth.edu/~eaherlihy/electionconcerns.doc. A complete transcript of the minutes should be available at the student senate website.