New Senate elections begin
April 8, 2008
(Click graphic to enlarge)
New Senate elections in four of MU’s 11 schools and colleges commenced Monday night.
The ballots for the College of Arts and Science, Trulaske College of Business, College of Engineering and School of Journalism were sent out around 5:45 p.m. to students in those schools. The ballots included instructions that voting would begin at 6 p.m., however, some students responded when they got the ballots before 6 p.m.
Board of Elections Commissioners Chairman Geoffrey Grammer said those ballots would not count and those students cannot vote again because the instructions on the ballot are explicit.
“It says in the e-mail that (the vote) can’t be sent before 6, even if you got (the ballot) earlier,” he said. “There were some people who got it earlier, but there were also some who got it later because it doesn’t send it out instantaneously to everyone, it’s a rolling process. That’s just the way the system works. Once they voted, that’s their only vote. They can’t cast another vote.”
The ballots were sent using the Division of Information Technology’s mass e-mailing program to students on each of the schools’ undergraduate listservs and included candidates for each school and instructions about how to vote. Students were told to put an “x” next to each candidate for whom they were voting and e-mail the BEC their selections from their MU e-mail account.
Grammer said the e-mails did not include an explanation about why a new election was required because BEC executive members felt the issue had been covered enough in campus media, and because the BEC notified candidates about the new election and asked them to inform constituents about the need for new elections.
Grammer said the BEC has no plans to release the results stating specifically how many votes each candidate receives in these four elections of the seven elections that were certified before spring break. Grammer said the BEC felt it was not appropriate to release the vote so candidates would not know the margins that they won or lost by.
“We just didn’t think it was appropriate because there are so many people voting and some elections were decided by small margins,” he said. “We were worried the candidates would ask why there wasn’t a re-vote. It’s not appropriate because you have 20-something people running in some cases, compared to two or three (in MSA presidential elections).”
Voting will conclude on Wednesday at 6 p.m.
DoIT releases study
about ballot problems
The Division of Information Technology released the results of its investigation into why some students received a message that they were not “eligible to vote in any active election” when they attempted to cast their ballots during the initial election March 17-19.
According to the findings, the error occurred because of translation problems between the previous computer program and the now-used myZou system. DoIT Director Terry Robb said the old computer system used different fields to classify students with dual majors and the new program does it differently.
“In the old system there was a primary and secondary major listed,” he said. “It does it differently in myZou. It was like translating from French to German. They name the fields differently in each database and we had to translate them so we could continue to use the old field names with the new data.”
Robb said programmers might re-write the voting application to work with myZou’s PeopleSoft coding instead of using translated data, though that will take programmers more time than it would to correct the translation errors.
Robb said 25 students were affected by the error.
Senate Speaker Jonathan Mays said it seemed like a “stretch” to believe that the only people affected by the IT problems happened to be the same number of students who filed complaints with the BEC about ballot errors.
“It would be a remarkable coincidence if the only people who were affected were those who complained,” he said.
Mays said the Student Court is planning to discuss the election and offer suggestions about how to ensure these problems don’t happen in the future. He said he’s anticipating their findings and would discuss the results with the Senate Operations Committee to determine whether further investigations are necessary.
In the meantime, Mays said he has e-mailed candidates who were not elected to encourage them to stay involved with MSA.
“I wrote to apologize for the problems with the election and said that if they had free time I’d appreciate the chance to meet with them and talk about ways to stay involved in Senate,” he said. “The goal is to have people in the position to run for at-large seats. I feel personally responsible for engaging them, rather than relying on them to express interest. I think it’s important that I engage them.”
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