Freshman election runoff delayed

Elections managers finally announced Tuesday that Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 will face Ashton Miller ’12 for the presidency and Lindy Li ’12 and Sojung Yi ’12 will vie for the vice presidency. Austin Hollimon ’12 and Bill Pang ’12 are contending for treasurer.

PJ Das ’12 won more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round and thus was elected social chair. Kelly Roache ’12 ran uncontested for class secretary.

Though runoff candidates were supposed to be announced Monday and voting was to take place on Tuesday, both were delayed.

Senior elections manager Braeden Kepner-Kraus ’10 apologized but did not explain the cause of the delays in an e-mail sent to the freshman class Monday.

“The registrar was unable to verify the elections results today ... As a result we’ll be postponing runoff elections until Wednesday,” he said in the e-mail.

Candidates expressed frustration with the lack of explanation following the delay.

Bill Pang ’12 described the e-mail as “not very revealing.”

“This should be over already,” he said. “We only have one day, so there isn’t too much time to keep campaigning. I don’t have any more posters to distribute. I’ve already been around to all of the rooms, and I feel that to do so again would be kind of rude.”

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Pang’s opponent, Hollimon, could not be reached for comment.

Kepner-Kraus said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian on Tuesday that the delays were not related to the registrar, but were caused by several technical errors during the recording and counting processes.

He explained that revisions to the Point website caused problems with the election results stored on that server on Friday, and the data had to be transferred to a different server.

Later, the webmaster forgot to send in the XML file recording the votes, Kepner-Kraus explained, and when the registrar received the file, the votes were recorded with students’ netIDs. To protect the voters’ privacy, the netIDs had to be dissociated from the votes.

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NetID identification problems also plagued the USG election last April, when the release of results from the U-Council elections was delayed after Class of 2009 senator Bruce Halperin changed the scripting language used to create the online ballot. As a result of the change, the Office of the Registrar was not able to verify the election results in time to release them on schedule.

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

Voting for the current runoff election will now begin today at noon. A runoff election occurs if no candidate for a race receives more than 50 percent of the vote.

Yaroshefsky said that because nine students ran for president, he thought it was almost certain that there would have to be a runoff.

“No candidate, unless they are amazing as Shirley Tilghman herself, could win 50 percent of the vote in the first round,” he said.

Miller said that he is optimistic about his chances.

“I can’t wait to work with Kelly, PJ, and the others who are elected,” he said in an e-mail.

In the first round of voting, one of the initial candidates for class president, Christopher Harding ’12, was censured by the USG for sending two unsolicited e-mails to the Class of 2012. No penalty resulted, however, because of a loophole in the USG election rules, Kepner-Kraus said.

Pang said he thought that “there is a bit too much restriction on what we can do in the campaign.”