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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

No winner announced in TCU Senate presidential election

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No winner was announced in the Tufts Community Union (TCU) Senate presidential election last night because of technological problems with the electronic voting system, Votenet. Tufts Election Commission (ECOM) has yet to decide whether the results of the election will be validated or a revote will occur.

Starting at 12:07 a.m. on April 22, ECOM began to receive emails from students who had difficulty voting, at which point they presumed the problems resulted from an "overloaded" system. These students were advised to use a different computer to vote, according to a statement from ECOM.

Later in the day, the number of emails increased. Most came from students who live off campus, where they were not connected to the Tufts network. In total, ECOM yesterday received 28 emails of this nature.

ECOM began investigating these complaints at 9 p.m. - when a student tweeted that no one in his house could vote - and found that there were more problems when voters were not connected to Tufts' wireless Internet, according to ECOM's statement.

Two hours later, ECOM directed students who had not voted to go on campus in order to do so. At the same time, ECOM met with the presidential candidates, juniors Robert Joseph and Andrew Nunez, TCU Senate President Joe Thibodeau and two members of the TCU Senate Judiciary Committee to determine the best way to handle the election results.

At midnight, when polls closed and the winner was supposed to be announced, ECOM determined it would withhold the election results until its members could consult with the Office of Campus Life and Tufts Technology Services to determine if a second vote would be possible, according to ECOM Chair Dan Johnson, a junior.

If there is a second vote, the results of the first will not be released, Johnson said. He declined to comment about who, or what, is at fault for the technical problems surrounding the vote.

Joseph and N???±ez will cease campaigning until the glitches have been resolved, according to a joint statement from the candidates. Both expressed frustration with the delayed results.

"The one thing that kept me anchored for the last few days was I kept telling myself it would be over," Joseph said. "Truth is stranger than fiction, and right now we're living the 2000 election in Florida over again."

"It takes a personal toll on the both of us, and we were really hoping just to be celebrating the end of our campaign today," N???±ez said. "We do recognize that the elections commission was established for a reason, and we really do appreciate the thoughtfulness that they take in making the decisions that they do."

In their joint statement, N???±ez and Joseph remained in good spirits, congratulating Thibodeau on "becoming the longest serving TCU President in university history."

For the first time this year, students cast their votes through iSIS on a new system called eBallot, which replaced the WebCenter system used for Senate elections as recently as last week. When the university switched, Johnson said no one informed ECOM about the change.

"We didn't find out about it until Sunday, which is when another student alerted it to us," Johnson said. "We never heard anything from iSIS or the administration."

While both candidates published instructions for how to vote via eBallot on their campaign Facebook pages, students expressed frustration towards the new mechanism. ECOM sent an email with voting directions yesterday afternoon to clear up the confusion.

Yet issues remained. Last night, ECOM announced it would allow students to submit votes via email. But, because the electronic voting system is anonymous and personal data is inaccessible, ECOM could not then determine if any student voted twice: Once through Votenet and again over email. Although ECOM would not specify the number of people who submitted email votes, it was an "insubstantial" number, according to Johnson.

Ultimately, ECOM determined it could not validate the results in time for its originally planned announcement. ECOM has not said when or if a new vote will be held, but Johnson stated that their bylaws require that a revote would have to occur within five academic days.

Abigail Feldman, Jamie Hoagland, Justin Rheingold and Josh Weiner contributed to the reporting of this article.