Class Council elections held yesterday were met with a significantly low student voter turnout. Due to a sudden date change and lack of advertisement for the elections, many students were caught unawares that the elections were occurring.
Only 13 percent of juniors cast votes for the elections, while freshmen had a 36 percent voting turnout rate, according to Elections Commission (ECOM) Chair Adam Weldai, a senior.
The Class Council elections were originally scheduled for Tuesday, but due to recent technical difficulties with the online voting system that caused the freshmen Senate elections to be voided twice, Programming Board decided last week to move the vote.
Sophomores were not allowed to cast ballots due to an error in the voting system, but Class Council positions for the current sophomore class were uncontested.
An e-mail was sent to the student body by Programming Board around 1:30 p.m. yesterday reminding students that they could vote online until midnight. Several students, however, said were unaware that the vote was rescheduled for yesterday.
"I didn't know about it at all except in conjunction with the freshman issues, sort of as a side note," junior Andrea Dwyer said.
Of the two dozen students interviewed by the Daily yesterday, most agreed that their lack of awareness was attributed to insufficient advertisement and publicity for the elections.
"I knew it was coming up eventually, but no one knew it was today ... so it was very surprising to me," sophomore Alyssa Edoo said.
Junior Stefanie Marx agreed. "It was not well-advertised this year at all," she said. "Other years, I knew when we were voting."
The e-mail notifying students of Thursday's vote was prepared to be sent out Tuesday night, Programming Board co-chair Vanessa White, a senior, told the Daily, but it had to be approved by the board's advisor in the Office for Campus Life and the dean of student affairs.
She added that they posted a notification of the vote on TuftsLife.com and put an ad in the Daily. No advertisement appeared on the main page of TuftsLife yesterday evening however.
Still, Programming Board was hesitant to publicize a confirmed date for the vote due to the recent voting issues with the freshman Senate elections, White said.
Freshmen senators were successfully elected on Wednesday after problems with Votenet, the online voting system, forced the ECOM to void the first two elections. The Class Council elections are also run through the Votenet system.
"There was a lot of uncertainty about the success of the Senate elections," White said. "We didn't want to set our date in stone until we were sure that everything was working for the Senate elections."
Weldai surmised that the low voting turnout rate might have been attributed to students' frustration with the prior Senate voting mishaps.
"Truthfully, I don't know anything about past turnout, but as ECOM chair, I'm probably able to say that their turnout was probably injured a bit by the fact that we had three freshman elections," Weldai said.
The Class Council online vote also had its problems.
Sophomores who attempted to cast their votes found that the Votenet system did not provide them a ballot. Programming Board knew of this error but decided against fixing the malfunction given that the rising junior class election was uncontested.
White said that the board would have to further postpone the election if they were to create a ballot.
"The bottom line is we would have had to reschedule the election having not made the decision to just proceed with the [rising] junior ballot not being operational," she said. "We were not going to be able to reschedule the election given all the rescheduling that has already happened."
White added that the Programming Board tries to separate the Class Council elections from the Senate elections by several days to avoid student confusion. Still, many students maintained that they did not understand the distinction between the two student groups.
"I've been here four years and I don't know what the difference is," senior Joel Hoyte said.
Leading up to the vote, ten freshmen, six sophomores and seven juniors vied for the five positions of president, academic vice president, social vice president, treasurer and secretary in their respective classes.
Anita Wu, Emily Gianetta, Constance Mourning, Scott Silverman and Elizabeth Chou were elected to next year's Senior Class Council, with Wu named as class president.
Lindsey Rosenbluth, Daniel Wittels, Brooke Rothstein, Adam Fischer, Alisa Brennan and Victoria Eastman were named to next year's Junior Class Council. Rosenbluth will serve as president in the fall semester and Wittels will serve in the spring.
Bryn Kass, Daniel Halpert, Caroline McHugh, Sarah Rauh and Sarah Gutkind will fill the rising sophomore seats. Kass will serve as president.
Nina Ford and Leslie Ogden contributed reporting to this article.
