Students to re-cast votes for senators
April 4, 2008
Missouri Students Association Student Court Chief Justice Drew Weber discusses problems with the electronic voting system at Tuesday’s Operations Committee meeting in Memorial Union. The MSA Board of Elections Commissioners executive board met Tuesday with the Operations Committee about holding new elections in four MU colleges whose students were unable to vote.
(Click graphic to enlarge)
New MSA Senate elections in four of MU’s 11 schools and colleges will be held from 6 p.m. Monday until 6 p.m. Wednesday, Board of Elections Commissioners Vice Chairman Justin Mohn said.
On Tuesday night, the BEC executive board presented its plan to the Missouri Students Association Senate Operations Committee to allow new elections in the School of Journalism, College of Arts and Science, College of Business and College of Engineering.
Mohn said the BEC will send a mass e-mail through the Division of Information Technology to students in the four schools. Mohn is a former staff member of The Maneater.
The e-mails will include a list of candidates’ names. To vote, students must reply to the e-mail and include their name, PawPrint and their senator selections by marking X’s in the typed brackets.
During the meeting, members of the Operations Committee questioned the BEC about whether allowing new elections in only these four schools was adequate, or if the seven other MU schools and colleges should also have new elections. Senate Speaker Jonathan Mays said he was surprised to learn at the meeting that the statistical analysis the BEC showed him did not include how the final outcome could have been affected by the unknown number of students who were unable to vote. Problems with the voting occurred because of a technical glitch with the electronic ballot designed by DoIT.
“I was more concerned after the meeting than I was before,” Mays said. “In a college like the (College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources) with a competitive election and a small margin of victory it’s not hard to imagine that if even a few students got the ineligible message it could have affected the outcome.”
Mays said the BEC has not released the number tallies of how many votes candidates received, so he doesn’t know how close the elections were.
Despite Mays’ concerns, Operations Committee members and Student Court Chief Justice Drew Weber said it’s better to cut any losses and only run new elections in the four schools in which the statistical analysis showed ballot issues definitely affected the outcome. The statistical analysis dealt with students who were required to re-vote after a new ballot was released March 17 three hours after it was discovered that the first ballot did not include voting instructions explaining how to vote for more than one candidate. About 200 students who voted with the first ballot did not re-cast their votes.
Weber said it’s not an ideal situation for the election, but the risk of disenfranchising voters and not being able to get them to re-vote is too high, and that it’s impossible to know how many students were really unable to vote because DoIT still has not proven how many students were affected by the technical glitch with the electronic ballot.
MSA Vice President Chelsea Johnson said the fact that candidates in the seven schools and colleges in which the BEC has already certified elections know they’ve won would make it difficult to take back that announcement and run new elections. In addition, Mays accepted the certification of those seven elections March 21.
Mohn said he was pleased with the discussion at the Operations Committee meeting and appreciated the feedback from members.
“It was a good discussion,” he said. “It’s a good thing to hear from other folks and make sure we’ve thought of everything. We took away suggestions and we think we’ve got a good working model now. It seems like we were all on the same page.”
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