Errors force SGA re-election

Due to multiple errors in the election software used for the recent Senate elections, the Student Government Association (SGA) has voted to hold re-elections. Voting for re-elections will be open from 12 p.m. Thursday, May 6, until 12 p.m. Friday, May 7. Re-elections will be held for all elections except for the student co-chair of the Community Council position and uncontested Wonnacott, Ross and Feb Senator elections.

After much discussion, the SGA voted to hold re-elections due to the numerous technological errors that occurred during the online voting process. First, the permission to “edit webforms” on the Drupal Webform module, the program used for the elections, was set to enable all “authenticated users.”

“This means that anyone logged into our website could edit any form on our website,” said SGA Director of Membership Tik Root ’12. “This setting can only be changed by people with the site administrator password. There are no logs of when, or for how long, this option was set this way.”

Michael Roy, Dean of LIS, cited problems with the Drupal module itself.

“Essentially [we were] a victim of this new platform,” he said. “We’ve moved away from the old Microsoft content management system to this new platform called Drupal, and we created a methodology for SGA to run elections using some Drupal forms, but the forms didn’t behave as advertised.”

The problem was then compounded by efforts made to rectify the situation. To address the problem of universal editing access, Root reset all the permissions on the election forms but accidentally reset the class voting groups. As a result, sophomores were set as the voters for the sophomore senator, juniors as voters for the junior senator, and seniors as the voters for the senior senator, although students should actually have voted for the senate position one year above their current year, since they will be in that year when the elected senator assumes his or her position on the SGA. There was a three-hour window during which students could vote in the wrong class senator election before the problem was identified and corrected.

“There was a bug in one of the forms and in debugging the bug, we introduced further bugs,” Roy explained. “There was a mismatch [in] who was supposed to access what data.”

One final problem with the election forms was that all students were granted access to the Cook Commons election. LIS confirmed that some incorrect voting did take place, 19 of the 171 voters for the Cook Commons senator were not on the Cook commons mailing list. This error was not identified for hours; all students could vote in the Cook Commons election from 5 p.m. on Thursday until Friday morning.

Roy added that part of the problem was that the students responsible for setting up the election forms did so very close to election time, effectively eliminating any chance for thorough testing of the finalized forms.

“Students being students,” Roy said, “this was all being done the night before the elections at 2 o’clock in the morning, and then the problems showed up right before [the election]. I’m going to insist that if we’re going to test this properly, the forms be finalized five days beforehand so they can actually be tested.”

The SGA decided to host re-elections as opposed to using the cross-checking abilities of the LIS to verify correct votes, because they did not want to alter results. Also, due to the three-hour window during which students were not allowed to vote for the correct class, the SGA was concerned that students did not go back and vote later if their earlier voting attempt was thwarted. Re-elections will ensure that all students have the same opportunity to vote in the correct elections. Although the SGA recognized that hosting another election may result in lower voter turnout and greater student displeasure, the senators decided to potentially sacrifice higher voter turn-out for the sake of ensuring valid election results.

Roy expressed agreement with the decision to host re-elections.

“I think it is the right thing to do because the data’s not good,” he said.

Campaigning by candidates will be allowed until re-elections begin at 12 p.m. on Thursday.