Glitches Continue To Plague Election

When Undergraduate Council elections finally began early yesterday morning after a two-day delay, it seemed the council’s problems were over.

But still more complications emerged—at least six dozen students never received personalized links to the council website allowing them to vote, according to council Technology Coordinator Jared S. Morgenstern ’03.

The council began sending e-mails at 2:45 a.m. yesterday after receiving data from the registrar’s office and the go-ahead from College administrators to mass e-mail undergraduates. The council sent out 6,393 e-mails as compared to the 6,465 total entries in the council’s database, Morgenstern said.

“There are holes in the data the registrar got us,” he said. “Our data also probably doesn’t even have entries for some people.”

Morgenstern also noted that students who transferred to Harvard this semester or who registered late probably did not receive e-mails. And those who deleted their e-mails before voting will probably not be able to cast ballots in the elections.

“If they delete their e-mail, they’re out of luck,” he said.

Council members said they were relatively unconcerned by the glitches, noting that students who did not receive e-mails can vote until tomorrow’s noon deadline by contacting ucvote@ucelections.org.

“This voting system is as perfect as we can get,” said council President Sujean S. Lee ’03. “I’m just extremely happy and relieved that voting is finally underway.”

Morgenstern said the omissions will have a negligible impact on the results of the elections.

“It won’t affect the voting at all,” he said. “The only problems that are happening, I wouldn’t even consider problems.”

In a message to the council’s e-mail list last night, Morgenstern wrote, “in just 6 hours or so, each house has already received more votes than in previous years.” But this year’s turnout thus far—about 1,512 at 7:30 p.m. yesterday, according to Morgenstern—actually falls far short of the 2,400 who cast ballots last year.

And Morgenstern said this year’s total is unlikely to increase much.

“My guess is that most of the people who were going to vote have already,” he said.

But several students said they have encountered obstacles to voting even after they contacted the council.

“I’ve been going through a fairly lengthy process to attempt to vote,” said Robert T. Elliott ’04, who did not receive an e-mail. “I have no idea of how I’m supposed to vote. In every attempt for me to vote, I’m getting blocked.”Even after he corresponded with Morgenstern, Elliott said, “Still, even now, I cannot vote.”

“It’s unacceptable,” he added. “When you have a situation where a significant number of people are disadvantaged, you are skewing the votes.”

Fred O. Smith ’04, a candidate for council representative in Leverett House, said he also had problems voting.

“My Web-browser wouldn’t support it,” he said. “That happened to a friend of mine, too.”

Yesterday’s glitches are the latest in a string of issues that have plagued the council’s attempts to move to Web-based voting this year.

On Monday afternoon, the day before the elections were slated to begin, administrators disallowed the council’s original plan to proceed.

Students would have been required to log into a non-Harvard website using their PINs and identification numbers to vote—a procedure administrators rejected over security concerns because personal student information would have been stored on an outside server.

Then, on Tuesday, voting was delayed again because Morgenstern and Edward D. Lim ’02, both of whom worked to revamp the council’s website over the summer, had not yet received data from the registrar’s office that would allow them to move ahead with the council’s new e-mail voting plan.

Despite the numerous delays, several students who did vote in the election praised the council’s website.

“It seemed pretty clear. I thought it was very professional,” Sheri J. Ward ’04 said.

“It was very understandable,” said Richard J. Przekop ’05. “It was easy.”

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