The Associated Students elections committee approved on Thursday not to count the 232 online votes that were lost in the A.S. elections on April 8 due to technical errors.
“From my understanding from the senate meeting is that you guys do not believe that these votes are 100 percent accurate, is that correct?” asked A.S. Elections Director Mazen Hafez to Paul Schantz and Brian Miller from the university’s Students Affairs Information Technology.
“The reason we stopped the (online) elections was because we couldn’t verify that they were correct,” Schantz said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable on counting them just because…they show holding a partial vote in some instances.”
Hafez informed Schantz and Miller that some of the candidates wanted to do electronic voting for the run-off election.
“We think that at this point the timeline for testing it is extremely compressed and as there is no formalized process for identifying testers and testing protocols, I’m not comfortable with that,” Schantz said. “I really think we would need at least a couple weeks to do proper testing.”
Schantz and Miller said it was up to the A.S. elections committee to decide to approve the online voting for the run-off election.
Hafez said the A.S. elections committee was not going to count the online votes because they could not be verified. He added that paper ballots were going to be used for the run-off election and not online voting.
In a special A.S. Senate meeting on Thursday, A.S. senators did not approve the postponement of a run-off election to occur on April 29-30, but approved for the run-off election to occur today and tomorrow.
Current A.S. President Adam Haverstock, who is running for re-election on the Students First slate, said he supported the decision whether senators voted against or for the postponement of a run-off election.
“I think the student senators intentionally tried to be hurtful to me,” Haverstock said. “I’m just trying to be the bigger person and try and do the best job I can, honestly, because if I tried to use political warfare to my advantage?it does sink down to a lower level, so I’d much rather take all the hits from the senators…and do my campaigning and win knowing I did the right thing. (I’d rather) go out and lose for the right reasons than to try and use some sort of political tools or tricks to give myself the advantage.”
Haverstock said he will not be able to campaign for the run-off election because of the Day of Action rally in Sacramento.
Senator Nicole Umali, who is running for vice president for the Educate, Empower, Enhance (E3) slate, said it was a good decision to approve the run-off election for April 22-23. Umali would not comment more on the run-off election.
Miguel Segura, who is running for A.S president for the E3 slate, did not attend the special A.S. Senate meeting. Segura said he was not able to attend the meeting because he had schoolwork he needed to catch up on. He added that that he thinks it’s the right choice to have the run-off election on April 22-23 because it follows the code of having a run-off election two weeks after the A.S. elections.
Another item on the agenda was to discuss to approve the action of allocating $12,000 for the purpose of the run-off election, but senators instead approved to allocate $8,000.
The run-off election is scheduled to take place on the Matador Walk today and tomorrow from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
