The technical glitch was discovered Wednesday morning by a student whose ballot was changed.
Due to a technical glitch this morning, more than 100 votes cast in the Student Senate election may have been incorrectly recorded, according to senate’s graduate assistant.
Senate’s Board of Elections and both tickets competing for senate seats received an email at 10:45 a.m., Wednesday alerting them to a glitch with the online election ballot, which has been open since Tuesday at 8 a.m.
At most 116 votes may have been affected by the glitch that caused the order of names appearing on the ballot to shift. The shift may have occurred if a voter first clicked a link provided in the ballot issues to view the full text of senate’s constitution and resolutions, and then used their browser’s “back” button, Jivanto van Hemert, senate’s graduate assistant, said.
Senate’s Board of Elections is unsure if a recount or another course of action will be needed when results are announced at 9 p.m. It is unclear if ballots for OU Graduate Student Senate election have been affected.
Senate was alerted to the issue by Gregory Scott, a senior studying marketing, who sent the email describing the error to Jenny Hall-Jones, the dean of students and interim vice president for Student Affairs, Aly Ruhl, senate’s Board of Elections chair, Alexis Apparicio, the Impact candidate for vice president and Hannah Clouser, the UNITE candidate for president. The Post was copied on the email.
The issue was resolved shortly after 11 a.m. the same day, according to van Hemert.
“I just wanted to make it aware on both sides,” Scott said. “Not everyone’s going to click the links to make it so it doesn’t go through, but for those that do, a relatively close race could potentially be affected.”
The email described an instance where Scott chose the bottom selection for president on the ballot, followed the link to read the resolutions and returned to his ballot to find the location of his previous selections were locked, but the order of names had changed.
“With help from the OIT team we edited the encoding for each of the three links to ensure that they automatically opened in a new window—thus eliminating the need to reload the ballot page in between,” van Hemert said in an email.
The Board of Elections was able to determine the maximum number of potentially affected ballots after the link took voters to files hosted by their OrgSync page. Google Analytics tracked page views for each resolution.
“In (an) effort to provide the greatest possible margin of error we presumed that every unique page view is a different voter and no voters verified their ballot (after viewing the resolutions, to presumptively correct any errors) before submission,” van Hemert said in an email.
A section of the Senate Rules & Procedures outlines how a failure of the electronic voting system should be handled.
“In the case of failure of the electronic voting system, the Board will convene to determine an appropriate course of action,” according to the rules and procedures.
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