Name left off electronic ballot during early hours of Undergraduate Assembly elections

A name was missing when student government ballots went live last night.

Engineering sophomore Jacob Henner , who is running for the Undergraduate Assembly School of Engineering and Applied Sciences representative, was not listed among his fellow candidates when the initial ballot went online last night.

Any students who voted between the original ballot’s release and the forty minutes before the new ballot was released may vote again in the new ballot, according to the Nominations and Elections Committee. Those students will not be prevented from voting in the replaced UA SEAS ballot.

Current UA representative and Engineering freshman Alex George , another candidate on the SEAS UA ballot, notified Engineering junior and NEC Vice Chair for Elections Frederick Ding of the error via email at 12:13 a.m.

The error was corrected at 12:13 a.m., and Henner’s name was added to the ballot. In order to prevent votes from students who saw the incorrect ballot from creating a bias in the overall results, the NEC removed that ballot from active voting and replaced it with an entirely new SEAS UA representative ballot, which included all candidates, at 12:40 a.m.

“I think — when I went to talk to the NEC about the er ror, I think their response was completely appropriate and very quick ... I’m really grate ful it was able to be taken care of the same night,” Henner said.

The seven SEAS candidates were consulted before the ballot was replaced.

“The NEC called all of the candidates running for Engineering representative and told them to let their voters know. They also emailed the Engineering Deans Advisory Board and reached out to the Facebook pages to propagate votes,” Henner said.

This change does not affect candidates on other ballots, and the new ballot will not double-count votes for UA SEAS representatives.

“It also will not double-count those votes in UA SEAS; it effectively wiped the slate for UA SEAS and gave all eligible engineering students a chance to cast their vote anew,” Ding said in an email statement.

Any engineering voters who voted before the 12:40 a.m. ballot replacement will have the opportunity to recast their votes.

Ding also said that on March 22, about 26 hours before voting opened, he emailed the full ballot to all of the candidates requesting that they verify their name and position on the ballot. Henner did not notify the NEC of the mistake at that time.

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