IOP registration glitch strands some students at voting booths

Six students, mostly first-years, were turned away from their Gund Hall polling place yesterday because their names never made it onto voting rolls.

At least three of the students said they registered to vote through the Institute of Politics (IOP) earlier this fall, and election officials last night said they would “reprimand” the IOP for carelessness in the way it delivers students’ registration forms.

According to Cambridge Election Commissioner Wayne “Rusty” Drugan, the forms were likely to have been lost in the mail. He said they never arrived at the commission’s offices.

Rather than sending registration forms in bulk through the mail, he said the IOP should hand-deliver them so that election officials can verify that each form has been received.

“An organization that has the good intention of doing this really has to follow through,” Drugan said. “We will reprimand them and make sure that in the future they do it properly.”

A similar but more severe problem plagued the IOP registration drive in the 2000 presidential election. That year about two dozen students were turned away from the polls because of problems with the electronic process the IOP used to sign students up.

Considering those miscues and this year’s problems, Drugan said his office will pursue the issue “vigorously.”

Before Election Day, IOP officials had said the problems of the 2000 drive had been fixed because they sent in the forms manually, rather than electronically.

They knew that some students had filled out their registration forms incorrectly, but they notified those students twice by e-mail.

According to Christian B. Flynn, the IOP’s special projects coordinator, some of those students fixed the mistakes, while others never responded. But the students who were turned away yesterday said they never received IOP e-mails.

“I’m not sure what the problem was,” Flynn said. “It could have been lost in the mail.”

The Harvard College Democrats also conduct a registration drive before election time, and according to President Sonia H. Kastner ’03, the group already follows the hand-delivery procedure when they register students to vote in Cambridge.

Several of the first-years who were turned away said they were trying to vote for the first time and were frustrated that they would have to wait until the next election.

“I was kind of upset,” said Anna R. Greenberg ’06. “I was pretty excited about my first vote.”

One of the other first-years turned away yesterday said she registered on-line through a link she found at a political website—even though election officials say no such process for Internet registration exists.

As the election warden in Gund Hall, Bill Willard oversaw voting yesterday in Ward 7, Precinct 3, which includes all the Yard dorms.

“We have to turn Harvard students away,” he said. “It makes me feel like a jerk.”

He filed a form last night with the election commission describing the problem because he said election officials need to oversee student-run registration drives more closely.

“If they want to freelance, they have to learn to freelance properly,” he said.