For Amplify, Engage and Baker/Atchley, the roller coaster that is the SGA elections will continue for one more day.
In a surprise turn of events, the SGA Election Commission announced that due to technical difficulties in this year’s new voting system, the results for the election will be postponed until Friday. Polls will be reopened today for students who were blocked from voting.
“We have run into one small situation that is going to prohibit us from unveiling the official results of the SGA election tonight,” Will Logan, the SGA Election Commissioner and a senior in microbiology, said. “When we were incorporating our brand new voting system there was a very small statistic of students that were not able to vote.”
That “statistic” consisted of students who had selected a strict privacy setting when setting up their NetIDs and passwords.
“When students generate their NetIDs and passwords, they are able to make those private,” Logan said. “So essentially this system wasn’t allowed access to their passwords. So that’s why their NetIDs and their passwords were not synching up.”
This glitch was best summed up by Associate Dean of Students Jeff Cathey, who likened it to a someone not wanting to have their name appear in a phone book.
“A student can say that they don’t want their name and information listed in the UT Directory,” Cathey said. “… These are all students who wouldn’t show up in ‘People Search.'”
For this specific group of UT students, and them alone, the polls will be reopened today at 8 a.m.
“We are slated to generate the same ballot and make it available to these students that have theis specific incident and allow them the opportunity to vote,” Logan said. ” … We want to emphasize that in no way was the election flawed. Everyone that voted was accounted for, but we just wanted to make sure that as a body, we are making this as fair and as equal as possible.”
The commission was not informed about the discrepency until the last minute.
“Right now, we had had a few issues brought to our attention by students who were attempting to vote,” Logan said. “A lot of the issues we were able to resolve on the spot. And we didn’t actually encounter this issue until 4:30 (Wednesday) afternoon, this specific incident. There were students with solvable issues, but this was the first unsolvable issue we encountered.”
Logan was also adamant that this problem was not through the fault or error of anyone.
“This is due to a technical error that is not resolvable by these students or by any member of the Election Commission or the Dean of Students Office,” Logan said.
The commission also made note that when the results are finalized, the process will be the same as it would have been yesterday.
“This body has to meet to certify the results of the election,” Logan said. “We will do the same thing at 3 o’clock [today] as long as the circumstances we’ve laid out can be incorporated. It will be certified by this body and revealed to the campaign.”
For those working on the campaigns themselves, the announcement came as a surprise. But despite the disappointment, some, like Daniel Aycock, a strategic advisor for the Amplify campaign and a senior in accounting, were satisfied with the commission’s decision.
“Of course we all wanted results [yesterday],” Aycock said. “But I think this is the most responsible way to handle a technical difficulty. Those students deserve the chance to cast their vote and we’ll just have to wait until [Friday].”
Ultimately, Logan stressed the need for the election, which Cathey said had drawn the votes of nearly 25 percent of the undergraduate population, to be fair for all voters.
“At the end of the day, we want to say that this election was complete, it was fair and it was equal,” he said.
