Error in voting system disrupts UA elections
Voting for class council and UA president and vice president was supposed to begin yesterday morning, but an error in the online voting system has thus far prevented voters from casting their ballots.
The problem appeared to be that the voting system, hosted through Qualtrics, only accepted one vote. All other would-be voters were met with the message “You have already taken this survey.”
UA Election Commission Chair Scott Perry ’19, who re-designed the voting system for this election, resigned yesterday. He declined to comment publicly on his resignation. At the time of this article’s writing, a replacement had not been found.
Current UA president Sophia Liu ’17 has asked Perry to transfer ownership of the Qualtrics account used for the voting to her, and is working to resolve the technical difficulties. She said that the voting system will be functional by Wednesday at the latest: “logistically it’s not hard to add certificates to the voting site.”
Liu has asked the UA Judicial Review Board to determine whether the election can continue without the selection of a new election commission chair. If the election were to continue in the absence of a new chair, JudBoard and the remaining members of the election commission may jointly oversee the election process.
Liu said she wanted to avoid the scenario where elections are further delayed by a long search process for a new chair, as well as the scenario where a chair is “haphazardly” selected.
The Tech has not yet heard from the UA JudBoard chair on the status of their deliberations.
The UA executive board, which consists of the president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, chief of staff, and the newly created role of assistant officer on diversity, is not supposed to be involved in elections. With the current vice president and secretary running for president and vice president respectively, it’s clear why this rule exists. The role of the election commission is to provide a neutral party to oversee the elections.
Voting is scheduled to end Friday 5 p.m. According the UA Elections Code, altering the elections schedule requires a “¾ person vote of the full voting membership of the UA Council” if the voting week is within 3 weeks of the alteration.