MSA opens concealed carry survey

Despite early issues, the survey will continue until Friday.

By Amanda Wysocki

Published April 27, 2009

The Missouri Students Association launched a weeklong vote concerning how students feel about concealed carry on campus, but shortly after the vote went online, the servers encountered problems and it was unable to handle any users.

MSA President Jordan Paul said the Division of Information Technology warned last week there would be problems with the server Sunday, so they would not be able to start the vote until Monday.

The vote began Sunday at midnight and will continue until Friday evening.

The Associated Students of the University of Missouri also conducted a survey on the topic through MU Info on April 8, but MSA wanted to increase the number of responses.

"It's unfortunate that it didn't start at 12 a.m. as planned, but the problem was fixed within 12 hours," Paul said. "Additionally, they let us know about schedule maintenance ahead of time, which I really appreciate. So, while it wasn't ideal, it could have been worse."

This election differs from previous ones in that it is open to all enrolled students and not just undergraduates. This caused problems for DoIT because employees had to reconfigure the design for the vote, DoIT Director Terry Robb said.

"It worked perfectly in development, but developers are busy and they forgot to copy something to the production environment," Robb said. "They found it this morning and fixed it."

DoIT received notice from MSA on April 22 that the vote would start this week, Robb said.

MSA Chief of Staff Domingo Pacheco said this is just one more in a string of problems with DoIT.

"There have been problems with numerous elections over the last couple years," Pacheco said. "With all of the budget problems going on over at IT, this is just another thing. There are consistently problems coming out of the department, and that disturbs me. It's a pattern of them botching a vote. That's the problem."

Pacheco said the problem was not as severe as if it had been an MSA Senate or presidential election.

"Despite the problems IT had with this vote, we are grateful there was a quick resolution," Pacheco said. "The problem was discovered last night but resolved as soon as their office opened. For that we are thankful."

Pacheco said he approached Paul about conducting the survey two weeks ago.

"Our goal is merely to get as many respondents as possible and thus the most accurate representation of students' views," Pacheco said.

Paul said MSA decided to hold the vote in order to reinforce the MSA Senate resolution passed two weeks ago against the concealed carry law.

"We wanted to get students' input while the issue was still at the forefront of their thoughts," Paul said.

Paul said they originally planned to start the vote late last week, but decided to hold off until this week.

"In the interest of an unsullied process, we decided to wait until Monday to begin the vote," Paul said.

MSA Senate Speaker Amanda Shelton said she did not want to move on the campus-wide vote yet.

"I felt that the time allotted beforehand was insufficient for ASUM to provide background information, IT to deal with technical issues with the application and MSA to advertise the opportunity to vote," Shelton said.