USG election results delayed by code mixup

In addition, USG officials acknowledged that last year’s election for U-Council violated both Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) bylaws and the USG constitution.

As a result of Halperin’s unilateral change, the Office of the Registrar was not able to verify the election results in time to release them last night. The results should be released today, senior elections manager Braeden Kepner-Kraus ’10 said in an interview.

“It’s important for us to ensure that the results are accurate,” USG president Josh Weinstein ’09 said in an e-mail. “The candidates are eager to find out, but I am sure that they — and the student body — believe that getting the count accurate is more important than getting a quick count.”

After voting ended at noon yesterday, Kepner-Kraus sent the unofficial results to James Chu, senior systems developer for academic services at OIT. Chu is responsible for running a full recount to ensure the web survey processed all of the data correctly before the Registrar certifies the results. Chu could not be reached for comment.

Halperin explained that his change made it so that instead of assigning each candidate in the election a number, the scripting language identified each candidate by his or her NetID. The script language OIT used to certify the results, however, requires numbers and not NetIds as inputs.

Kepner-Kraus said Chu had finished tallying the results for the classes of 2010 and 2011 but could not finish the Class of 2009 results before the end of the business day.

“That was something that we didn’t realize would be a problem for OIT,” Halperin explained.

Kepner-Kraus said he was unaware that Halperin had made the change and does not know why it was made.

“It didn’t need to be changed, and I think it shouldn’t have been changed,” Kepner-Kraus said.

Halperin said he decided to modify the scripting language for the USG ballot a few months ago but said he does not believe OIT knew of the change until today’s verification process began.

Halperin said that the USG’s web survey did in fact show the winners after voting ended, but these unofficial results cannot be released until certified.

“It’s not that we don’t know who won,” he explained. “It’s that the Registrar can’t certify the winners until they fix their script problem.”

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“We didn’t want to release partial results,” Kepner-Kraus said. “We decided [that] since we couldn’t release them all tonight, we’d wait to release everything tomorrow morning.”

Weinstein also said he was unaware of the change, but added that based on his conversation with OIT, the problem sounded like “an irrelevant and minor logistical issue.”

Changes to last year’s procedures

Halperin said that he decided to change the script in light of difficulties determining the winners in last April’s U-Council race.

“Last year there was a little bit of a hard time tallying the U-Council votes,” he explained. “It took us a little longer than we thought. I thought I could change it to NetID and write up a script so elections managers could tally it up electronically and we wouldn’t have to do it manually.”

Halperin explained that last year, elections managers were forced to do hours of manual calculations to determine the winners in the U-Council race, and that his change was meant to expedite the process this year.

For at least five years before last April’s election, U-Councilors were elected using the single-transferable vote (STV) formula. Last year, however, USG officials decided to change the format so that students ranked 10 preferences, and each preference was weighted with a decreasing amount of points.

The 10 candidates with the most points won seats to the U-Council. This method, however, does not use an STV formula to determine the winners, Halperin said.

Bylaws of the CPUC and the USG constitution mandate that U-Council elections be conducted using the STV formula.

Weinstein, who served as senior elections manager during last spring’s vote, said that no one on the USG was aware that last year’s voting process violated CPUC bylaws and the USG constitution.

Though the current slate of U-Councilors was elected using the weighted preference system, Weinstein and Halperin both said that it’s possible the results of last April’s election would have been different had the STV formula been followed.