Fallout of UC Election Colored By Allegations of Misconduct, Internal Dissension, and Incriminating E-mails

CORRECTION APPENDED

At 10 p.m. last Thursday evening, the Undergraduate Council Election Commission convened in the dark at the steps of Widener library to engage in the annual rite of marching to the headquarters of the winning ticket and announcing the results.

For appearance’s sake, all was as it usually was. Voting had closed at noon that day, and the results had been certified by an oral vote of five of the seven-member Commission—which oversees the elections each year—six hours later. But after a few minutes of squabbling, Commission Chair Brad A. Seiler ’10 relocated the gathering to the Science Center for an impromptu meeting.

By midnight, Seiler and two other Commission members had abruptly resigned their posts, an e-mail to the Undergraduate Council open list (UC General) signed by the UC Vice President questioned the validity of the voting results and suggested possible vote tampering, and the presidential ticket of John F. Bowman ‘11 and Eric N. Hysen ’11, celebrating in its Pforzheimer belltower headquarters after the Crimson Web site erroneously announced their victory, had to be told that things were far from decided.

Three days after the ending of the closest Undergraduate Council presidential election in recent history, while the student body’s chief governing organization finalizes plans to pass judgment on vote tallies that remain decertified today, a series of interviews by The Crimson shed some light on the events that led to Friday’s confused outcome and the questions that may define the discourse on what remains to be done.

The picture that emerges is of a battle for the soul of an election that extends well beyond the candidates themselves, encompassing several former Council members—one of them now graduated—the current leadership, and the Commission itself.

On Tuesday, Nov. 10, former Student Affairs Committee Chair Tamar Holoshitz ’10 had an Internet chat with former UC Vice President Randall S. Sarafa ’09, in which he told Holoshitz that VP candidate Hysen, the technical director for the UC, had the passwords to access the voting software.

Holoshitz wrote to Seiler on Nov. 15, a day before voting opened, inquiring about the EC’s efforts to ensure that the software was monitored by others besides himself.

Seiler responded that he would bring the issue to the EC to decide.

On the same Sunday, Seiler wrote to both Hysen and current UC President Andrea R. Flores ’10 informing them that their access to the ucvote.web service had been revoked.

In later e-mails on Nov. 16, Seiler informed Holoshitz that it had been decided at an EC meeting earlier that day that all Commissioners would receive access to the voting software, and that he was at the time the only one who could access the voting software. But commissioners did not receive access to the software until Thursday after the election.

Holoshitz forwarded her e-mail, and Seiler’s subsequent responses, to both current UC Vice President Kia J. McLeod ’10 and former UC presidential candidate Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10, who lost in a bitter race against Flores last year. In these e-mails, she discussed with Schwartz the possibility of feeding a story about the voting software to a Crimson reporter.

Voting opened to the student body at noon on Nov. 16.

According to EC member Phillip Morris ’12, Seiler brought up at the EC meeting the following day—Monday—the possibility of a technological loophole that could allow outside parties to access the voting software.

There are two ways that a user could theoretically access the voting results, Seiler said in an interview with The Crimson last week. One requires the user to go through the administrative interface on the UC Web site, an access method that Seiler claimed remained only to him after Hysen and Flores’ access were removed on Nov. 15.

The second is through direct access to the MySQL database that holds raw voter data. Seiler said that it would be possible to modify the votes in this way, explaining that as far as he knew, only he and Hysen had access to the database.

On Tuesday, Nov. 17—after approximately 2,200 votes had been cast, according to Morris—Seiler, a computer science concentrator who worked at Google last summer, wrote a logging program from his own personal FAS account to address the database “vulnerability,” which Seiler said had existed since the system was first designed. The program he wrote would notify him anytime anyone accessed the MySQL database on which the votes were stored, he said.

Around 10 a.m. on Thursday, Flores tried to log into ucpres@gmail.com, an account for which only she, Vice President McLeod, and Student Relations Committee Chair Daniel V. Kroop ’10 knew the password. The account sends e-mails on the behalf of the Council president with the listed address of ucpres@fas.harvard.edu, Flores said.

Both McLeod and Kroop denied knowing anything about the password change, Flores said, though The Crimson obtained an e-mail yesterday forwarded by McLeod to several parties, including Schwartz, Holoshitz and presidential candidate George J. J. Hayward ’11 early Thursday afternoon in which Flores asked for the password.

“[H]a jokes! HAHAHA...should I change it back?” reads McLeod’s comment on the e-mail.

At noon on Thursday, online voting for the presidential elections closed.

At 5:30 Thursday afternoon, 5 members of the Election Commission—Seiler, Dennis M. Mwaura ’12, Emily E. Osborne ’12, Daniel P. Robinson ’10, and Sanyee Yuan ’12—met to certify the results.

Seiler showed the four other members the voting results, which indicated a Bowman-Hysen victory, as tallied by the voting software.

Seiler then took an oral vote to certify the results. According to Osborne, one of the EC members who later resigned, there were no voices of dissent at the time, resulting in a successful certification.

But a few hours later, Yuan learned about the technological loophole that Seiler addressed Monday—a meeting that she did not attend—and became concerned about whether the election had been “free and fair.”

According to Yuan, her requests to Seiler to reconsider the certification of the results were originally rebuffed.

At 8:15 p.m. that evening, Morris met Yuan in Quincy House after the conclusion of the UC Student Initiatives Committee meeting, chaired by Mallika Khandelwal ’11. After discussing their concerns about the voting process and Seiler’s leadership, the two commissioners approached Khandelwal, a known supporter of the presidential campaign of Hayward and Felix M. Zhang ’11, with their worries.

Morris said that Khandelwal encouraged the two to talk to other commissioners, and then informed McLeod of the situation.

10 p.m. found the EC discussing Morris and Yuan’s concerns on the steps of Widener Library, when Seiler called the emergency meeting in the Science Center.

At approximately 10:45 p.m., Seiler, Osborne, and Robinson returned to Widener. Seiler notified The Crimson that they had voted to decertify the election results.

The small crowd that had been awaiting their return—which included Khandelwal, UC representatives Daniel P. Bicknell ’13 and David Gonzalez ’11, and for short periods of time McLeod, Holoshitz, and Schwartz—dispersed shortly afterwards.

Around 11 p.m., Student Initiatives Committee Chair Khandelwal and Bicknell went to the Quincy House dining hall to do homework, according to Bicknell.

He said that he accompanied Khandelwal to the Spindell private dining room at the back of Quincy dining hall, where he saw Holoshitz, McLeod, and Schwartz writing on a laptop. Schwartz had encouraged a Crimson reporter an hour earlier to come to Quincy House, texting first “Just come” and then “Scandal.”

Both Holoshitz and Schwartz are registered members of the Hayward-Zhang campaign staff, the primary ticket opposing Bowman-Hysen. McLeod sent e-mails and texts in support of the ticket last week.

According to Bicknell, Schwartz requested that he leave the room, at which point he returned to the main dining hall, though Khandelwal remained in the room.

Bicknell said Holoshitz came out of the room shortly afterwards to tell him and Gonzalez, who had just arrived, not to tell anyone that she, McLeod, and Schwartz were in the Spindell room.

Around 11:30, Bicknell said Khandelwal came out of the room, saying that Holoshitz, McLeod, and Schwartz were drafting an e-mail which she had told McLeod not to send.

At 11:36 p.m., an e-mail sent from ucpres@fas.harvard.edu with the subject line “A Message on the Election from UC Vice-President Kia McLeod” was sent over the UC-general e-mail list. The message implied that, among other charges, vice presidential candidate Hysen may have had access to—and even tampered with—students’ votes in the election.

According to Bicknell, Khandelwal, followed by Kroop, re-entered the room after the first e-mail and encouraged McLeod to send out a retraction.

Khandelwal could not be reached for comment last night. Schwartz, when asked to comment on his involvement last night, responded only via text, writing that the claims were “sheer political maneuvering to distract from the improprieties of the election.”

At 12:27 a.m., an e-mail from McLeod’s personal FAS account was sent with the subject line “PLEASE READ: Retraction of UC-Presidential Email.”

“I would like it to be known that I did not draft [the previous e-mail],” she wrote in the retraction.

McLeod told The Crimson in an interview soon after that she did not send the e-mail, and had no comment on who was responsible.

“It was an inappropriate use of Eric Hysen’s and my name, and it should be completely disregarded,” she said.

At around 3:30 in the morning on Friday, after McLeod’s retraction e-mail, Flores received an e-mail from McLeod with the new log-in information to the UC president e-mail account.

Upon re-entering the account, Flores found multiple drafts of the original message with McLeod’s signature.

CORRECTION

The original headline of the Nov. 23 news article "Fallout of UC Election Colored By Allegations of Misconduct, Internal Dissension, and Incriminating E-mails" incorrectly referred to e-mails sent alleging fraud in the UC election as "libelous." In fact, because libel is a legal standard that requires there to be a provably false statement of fact, the e-mails could not be deemed libelous.