Internet glitch disrupts voting on UA referenda

An online glitch disrupted the Undergraduate Assembly referenda section of the Penn InTouch voting process last Tuesday. Students voting that morning encountered problems with casting their ballots, and since then, only some have been allowed to recast their votes.

At approximately 11 a.m., after the polls had been open for three hours, officials realized that the Web site was only allowing students to vote for one of the four proposed UA constitutional changes, rather than opening up all four, as was intended.

Referenda items focus mainly on internal changes to the UA, such as the formulas used to allocate seats and the responsibilities of certain executive committee members. One refers to a policy change that would enable UA members to vote on the election of the body's chairman in a closed-door session.

Twenty percent of the undergraduate student body must vote either for or against the constitution changes in order to validate the vote itself. Even if the majority votes are in favor of the changes, if the minimum number of students do not participate, the vote will be disqualified.

"Obviously [the technical problem] was unfortunate -- we're hoping that it won't affect getting the requisite 20 percent," said UA Chairman and College senior Jason Levy. "Worse comes to worse, we'll bring [up the constitutional changes] at the referenda again next year."

Director of Student Life Fran Walker said that the error resulted from her setup of the referenda section.

"I had put the wrong code in," she said, noting that the referenda portion of the site had to be shut down temporarily so that Information Systems and Computing could fix the error.

Estimates about how long the site was out of commission range from two to six hours.

Though the referenda vote has been opened back up to the 170 people who could not access it during the blackout period, the technology has not been as kind to those early-morning risers who were initially prevented from voting for all four referenda items.

"Anybody that voted before 11 o'clock when we shut it down [can]not go back and vote," UA member Matt Lattman said.

Walker said she waited to send out her traditional election-season e-mail encouraging students to vote until the situation was repaired.

"In that mailing, I said if you were unable to vote" to go back and try it again, Walker said.

Lattman said he and fellow UA members were still disturbed by the incident.

"The issue for us was really do you ask for the election to be restarted or do we just kind of continue along," the Engineering senior said.

Acknowledging that the technical glitch "was not anything that [was] done maliciously," Lattman still said that it was "unfair to us to miss that period of time."

"The [Nominations and Elections Committee] kind of knew that if we felt disenfranchised, we would have had every right to bring a violation on the election," he said.

Ultimately, the UA decided not to further disrupt the voting process.

"From a utilitarian perspective, it would have been a lot worse to start the election over," Lattman said.

Though Lattman said Walker was considering extending the referenda vote by a day, Walker decided that an extension would not be necessary because the site was up and working again by the end of Tuesday.

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