MSA reviews election

By Jenna Youngs
May 9, 2008

Before it began, no one expected the spring Missouri Students Association Senate election to last longer than the three days for which it was scheduled.

Eight weeks later, members of the Senate, Board of Elections Commissioners and Student Court are still trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it.

History

Since problems with electronic ballots were first discovered at 6 p.m. March 17, members of the various MSA departments attempted to create immediate solutions to the problems, but each solution unearthed another problem.

First, the ballots did not include instructions about how to vote for more than one candidate. The BEC opted to scrap the initial ballots and release new ones about three hours later. However, releasing new ballots required 700 people who voted before then to recast their ballots with new ones.

When the election ended March 19, the BEC said four elections were too close to call. Additionally, an unknown number of voters were unable to vote for techinical reasons.

A new election was held in those colleges from April 7 to 9. The BEC determined an e-mail ballot would relieve problems associated with previous ballots designed by the Division of Information Technology. However, the e-mail ballots were sent 10 minutes early. Initially, the BEC agreed to count the early ballots as absentee ballots. It then rescinded the decision, refusing to count them at all.

Resolving the problems

For the past few weeks, the BEC, Student Court and Senate Operations Committee have been discussing election bylaws to prevent further problems.

Election bills dominated the year’s final Senate meeting Wednesday night and produced the most heated debate of the year. Although the bill to update election bylaws presented by Operations Committee Chairman Corey Gibson met relatively few questions and easily passed, Shelton’s proposal passed 12-6, barely meeting the two-thirds vote requirement.

Gibson and most other committee chairpersons opposed the bills of rights, saying they were too vague and allowed people to easily and unnecessarily contest heated elections. They specified that the wording might allow students to vote twice by submitting an electronic ballot and a paper ballot.

Also during the meeting, the Senate approved new BEC executive members, opting to reappoint current Vice Chairman Justin Mohn and adding Student Affairs Committee Chairwoman Erin Moran and Student Affairs Senator Ryan Senciboy. During each of their presentations, all three also said they would work to ensure next year’s elections run smoothly.

Mohn, a member of the Maneater staff, said it would be necessary to completely rework the BEC handbook for the Senate elections because the handbook used this year was “basically a hybrid of presidential election rules” and is not built to handle the large number of candidates who run in Senate elections.

He said in the future, the BEC would need to be work with DoIT and others in MSA to prevent and alleviate problems.

“We need to be aggressive so we don’t have what happened with (DoIT) happen again,” he said. “We also need to increase communication. Everyone thought they knew what everyone else wanted until problems came up.”

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