Kristina Wiltsee and Hussein Al Baya were elected Student Body President and Vice President by a margin of only two votes, and Daniel Papasian was also elected Vice President for Finance in an election plagued by two technical mishaps.

On Tuesday, at approximately 1 pm, the Student Body Elections Board was made aware of a technical problem with the elections server. According to a cmu.misc.market posting made by Elections Board Chairman Christopher Watkins, “This technical difficulty has allowed graduate students to vote for undergraduate student senators. The votes, however, for the Presidential and VP of Finance races are intact and accurate.”

The posting further stated that votes for Senators taken up to that point would be invalidated, and that Senate elections would resume next Monday and Tuesday, April 12th and 13th.

Watkins’ initial campus notifications occurred on the cmu.misc.market bulletin board. There, concerns were immediately raised by several students questioning the appropriate medium for informing the campus community of the electoral changes.

In one of several responses, Michael Crouch, a junior physics student, said, “You [Watkins] have sent an e-mail to a single unofficial Bulletin Board, without having emailed the undergraduate students as a whole, or posted this message in official.cmu-news.”

Watkins made the following verbal response concerning his decision to post the elections announcement on cmu.misc.market: “We [The Elections Committee] posted an announcement on the elections page, made Student Senate announcements, sent an announcement to all candidates, and under the advisement of John Hannon, director of student activities, we refrained from spamming and instead chose to get the message out through other e-mail channels. It’s tough to send official announcements out,” Watkins commented.

Watkins explained how graduate students were initially allowed to vote for undergraduate senators.

“Due to an error in inputting the info into the database, done by the technology chair, he [the technology chair] inputted the grad students as a member of a department…as soon as you identify a grad student with a department, the code was written to assume a grad student was an undergrad.”

On Tuesday, Hannon sent an e-mail alerting various student leaders of the website’s error in allowing graduate students to vote for senators; in his e-mail, he also announced the new dates for the senate elections.

The student body elections endured a second round of technical difficulties when the elections server unexpectedly went down early Tuesday evening.

Watkins said that due to the pre-elections time crunch with petitions and setting up the elections, time ran out before an elections test was run. He was only able to meet with the technology chair briefly during the weeks leading up to the elections.

“There was an oversight that was only noticed once the elections began,” Watkins stated.

Watkins reported that the server managing the elections was taken off the network because of its significant increase in bandwidth. Due to the elections and anticipated high traffic on the elections website, the bandwidth increase was deemed legitimate. Watkins, the elections committee, and John Lerchey of Computer and Network Security, worked to restore the server to full operation. The server resumed network activity on Thursday morning, allowing both Presidential and Vice President of Finance elections to continue through Thursday’s 11:59 PM extended deadline.

Several candidates for Senate commented on the recent election difficulties. When asked how it affected his campaign, Andres Bermudez, H&SS Senatorial candidate replied, “I suppose a lot. I had given out flyers that had the wrong date, and it also makes people less likely to vote…I will probably be giving out flyers on Monday or perhaps [Friday].”

SCS candidate Jonathan Mendelson responded by saying, “Next year when choosing the elections chair, I’m going to ask that the chair do a mock election to test out the software and make sure there are no problems with the system.” Reflecting on the 2004 national elections, Mendelson added: “This is just a reminder that technology isn’t perfect…. Given the number of electorates that are moving towards electronic voting systems, I’m concerned about the 2004 elections. It should make people press their leaders to ensure that they have better systems, because in a democracy, making sure that the vote count is accurate is vital.”

Presidential candidate Jason Pock said, “[We will] make sure the people don’t get frustrated and give up. [We will] make sure people understand someone is working on the issue.”

On Thursday, presidential candidate Kristina Wiltsee said, “It’s going to hinder the progress we had in terms of the voter turnout. All four of the candidates will push people to keep on voting today [Thursday] to at least get as high a turnout as we’ve had in years past.”

The elections concluded Thursday evening, and the unofficial results for the race were posted on the elections website, http://elections.andrew.cmu.edu. On Monday, members of Student Senate will hold a special meeting to discuss and confirm the results of the presidential election.