Glitch Disrupts Council Vote

There were no punch cards or dimpled chads, but yesterday, for the second straight year, technical glitches disrupted the opening of online voting in the Undergraduate Council elections.

According to organizers, problems with the council’s voting software and a mistake by Harvard computing services virtually disenfranchised as many as 1600 first-years and dozens of upperclass students for the first six hours of the election.

Students new to Harvard—including transfers—and those who switched houses encountered errors when they attempted to vote. Also barred from voting were students who took a leave of absence last year or who studied abroad.

The problems were solved by 6 p.m. yesterday evening, an improvement compared to last year, when administration concerns over the election procedure forced the vote to be delayed by two days.

Last fall, the council ultimately alleviated concerns that student information would be hosted on a non-secure server by partnering with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Computing Services (FASCS).

That new system, created by Jared S. Morgenstern ’03 and Edward D. Lim ’02, encountered another glitch yesterday.

“Two different outages occurred together, one in our system and the other in the council’s election software,” said Coordinator of Residential Computing Kevin S. Davis ’98. Council President Rohit Chopra ’04 and Election Commission Chair David I. Monteiro ’04 worked with FASCS administrators yesterday to fix the problems.

“We did not run the program that we needed to run,” Davis said.

As a result, anyone new to the voting system couldn’t be assigned the random identification number that is necessary for authentication.

Because of the FASCS error, first-years and transfer students were not able to vote.

Davis said that FASCS was not informed of the problem until 4:30 p.m. yesterday, but Monteiro said that he approached computer services at 3 p.m.

A separate glitch in the council’s program kept inter-house transfers from the polls, Davis said.

The council’s program is designed to ensure that students only vote for representatives in their own voting districts, or for their own houses, but the program did not take into account students who transferred houses.

“Sophomores who transferred houses received an error message saying that there was a problem with their voting district,” Davis said.

According to Davis, FASCS and the council shared responsibility for the problems.

“I’m not trying to defer the fault for this. There’s plenty of blame to go around,” Davis said. “Its really tough putting together an election like this.”

Council officials lauded FASCS’ effort and were confident that the glitch wouldn’t affect election results.

“I can say without a single grain of uncertainty that the integrity of the elections was not affected,” Chopra said.

Jack McCambridge, a chair on last year’s Campus Life Committee who is also running in the elections, said that the council’s reliance on FASCS to run their elections is a double-edged sword.

“The difficulty is that we do have to rely on FAS data, its important to the legitimacy of the vote. Its bad that these mistakes occur, but they tackled them really early at a time when most people don’t vote. It could have been a much bigger problem,” he said.

—Staff writer Ebonie D. Hazle can be reached at hazle@fas.harvard.edu.