After Delays, Council Voting Will Begin Today

A day after the scheduled start of Undergraduate Council elections, council leadership has nearly finalized an arrangement with College administrators to allow voting to begin.

Council President Sujean S. Lee ’03 said the council hopes to begin elections by noon today.

Chair of the council’s Election Commission Nancy A. Redd ’03 wrote in a message to the council’s e-mail list last night saying that elections will run through 10 a.m. Friday. The election had originally been scheduled to end tomorrow at 11:59 p.m.

Every undergraduate will receive an e-mail containing a secure personalized link to a website on which they can cast their vote.

The e-mail will be sent out after the council is given student identification data from the registrar’s office.

Lee said both the registrar’s office and the Office of the Dean of the College had approved the new voting arrangement.

Concerns about the security of the council’s planned Web-based voting system caused the administration Monday afternoon to block the elections’ start, said Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71.

“We had worked on this all last week. They knew there was a problem with using an off-site server,” Illingworth said. “I told Sujean last week that the elections couldn’t go forth at this point. She knew this was an issue last week.”

Lee, on the other hand, said that the council had little advance notice.

“Despite the fact that Susan Cooke and the administration was aware and supportive of our efforts, they waited until this past week to voice these concerns, giving us very, very little time to address them,” she said.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 indicated he “was a bit surprised” to learn of Lee’s criticism of the College administration.

“The main thing now is to avoid blame-casting if possible and to get the election underway,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Council members met with Registrar Arlene F. Becella and Associate Dean of the College Georgene B. Herschbach yesterday to discuss arrangements for a system that would meet security protocol, said council Technology Coordinator Jared S. Morgenstern ’03.

The delay marks yet another in a series of technology-related postponements to council elections, according to former council President Paul A. Gusmorino ’02. While this year’s delay is the longest in the past four years, the council’s fall 1998 election had to be entirely rerun because of technology glitches.

The Roots of the Problem

The council began using a Telnet-based voting system with its December 1996 presidential elections, and the system, called “ucvote,” was used until this year.

“Ucvote” was hosted on a server located in the basement of Holworthy Hall. Over time, numerous problems arose with the system.

“There wasn’t enough memory in the system,” Morgenstern said. “There wasn’t even a terminal interface. It was just a server in a room. We could only access it remotely.”

Lee said “ucvote” was “very limited” and “very hard to teach to another student.”

Last year, the council passed a bill allocating funds to technology updates.

Using funds designated in the bill, the council hired Morgenstern and Edward D. Lim ’02 to spend the past summer revamping the website and creating a Web-based voting system.

Morgenstern and Lim initially intended to set up the council’s website at www.theuc.com, but administrators disallowed that plan.

“The [University] didn’t like an affiliation with an apparently Harvard organization using a dot com address,” Morgenstern said.

So Lim and Morgenstern asked Harvard Computing Services (HCS) about finding a University-affiliated server to host the council’s website.

“We assumed, and perhaps we shouldn’t have, that we would be able to run a site based on HCS’s servers,” Morgenstern said.

On Sept. 15, according to Morgenstern, HCS told him that they would be unable to host the council’s secure voting website.

Morgenstern said he and Lim then looked into establishing a website with a harvard.edu component in its URL.

After reaching dead ends pursuing this option, Morgenstern said they set up www.ucelections.org.

According to Lee, Coordinator of Student Affairs Susan T. Cooke had indicated this website would not be rejected by the administration, since it didn’t have a .com address.

When administrators learned of the new website, the College took “a renewed interest” in the council’s attempt to store registrar’s data on non-Harvard servers, Morgenstern said.

The new voting system would have required students to log in using their I.D. and personal identification numbers—information that had been provided to the council to run past elections.

“This kind of exploded,” Morgenstern added. “Their major concern was having registrar’s data outside of Harvard’s domain.”

Illingworth emphasized the confidential nature of the registrar’s data.

“The registrar, as is her job, is very careful about confidential information,” he said. “If I asked her for a list of Harvard I.D. numbers, she wouldn’t give them to me.”

Lee said that the administration should not have been concerned about the council using the information.

“It’s not like we stole the information,” she said. “The registrar has provided us with this information, knowing that we were using it in a protected manner to conduct fair UC elections.”

Last-minute Efforts

After Illingworth’s decision Monday afternoon, Lee discussed with Morgenstern the possibility of sending an e-mail to every undergraduate via a spamming program.

Morgenstern said he had considered the possibility of disciplinary action being taken against him for sending out the e-mails without administrative approval, but still felt the administration “probably couldn’t punish me.”

Illingworth said that the possibility of ad-boarding students for violating the anti-spamming rule “hasn’t been a serious consideration in this office.”

And yesterday afternoon, Illingworth indicated he would allow the council to e-mail every student if he found the process to be effective and secure.

“I think I would make an exception to the ‘no mass e-mail’ rule, but I need to be sure that this would work,” Illingworth said.

Candidates in the council’s elections expressed some disappointment about the postponement.

“I think the delay in UC elections is unfortunate,” said Michael R. Blickstead ’05, who is running for election in Eliot House.

—Staff writer Alexander J. Blenkinsopp can be reached at blenkins@fas.harvard.edu.