Details of USG investigation unclear

revote to elect the next USG vice president is set to take place in mid-February

Former USG president Josh Weinstein '09 questioned the delay in reporting the investigation results and asked why Dunne was so involved in the process. He also noted that it was Wang, not Jin, who called the meetings and filed the complaint to Dunne that led to the investigation.

After the USG Senate unanimously voted to cancel the initial revote called by former elections manager Braeden Kepner-Krauss ’10, Class of 2011 senator George Tsivin ’10 filed a complaint on Dec. 9 with Wang. The complaint alleged that some USG members, including Weinstein, could have accessed the election results before the Senate voted on the revote. Weinstein’s potential prior knowledge of the victory of Michael Weinberg ’11, whom Weinstein had endorsed, might have influenced him to argue against a revote, Tsivin said. Weinstein abstained from voting on the revote while every other member of the Senate opposed it.

Wang and Tsivin both supported Weinberg's opponent, Nick DeBerardino '11, in the election.

Following Tsivin’s complaint, Wang told Tsivin on Dec. 9 that he would investigate the charges, Tsivin said. Wang said he asked the Office of Information Technology (OIT) on Dec. 10 to check the access logs for the election software.

OIT contacted Dunne in his capacity as the administration’s adviser for the USG, Wang explained. Several days later, over winter break, Dunne contacted Wang and Jin to tell them he had received data from OIT, Wang said.

“The data [we asked OIT to look for] was the log-in times for people using the ‘usg’ account and the ‘usgvote’ account,” Wang said.

OIT retrieved logs of the log-in times for both accounts, but the information was inconclusive, Wang said.

“We got times back to us about access to ‘usg’ and ‘usgvote’ [e-mail accounts], but the ambiguity was that we didn’t know what these times were for: [election] Websurvey or e-mail access,” Wang said. He added that it was later determined that the times corresponded to when people were using these accounts to access e-mail rather than the election data.

By the time it was established that the log-in times OIT had provided were not tied to the election software, another set of data that would have revealed who had accessed that software had already been deleted “per usual maintenance,” Wang said. This deletion occurred on Dec. 16, six days after Wang asked OIT to check the election software logs, according to the USG’s Investigation Briefing on the matter. Wang said he was uncertain why that information was not retrieved during those six days, but he added that he believed OIT was confused about what the USG investigation team was seeking, even though he had specified which logs he wanted in his initial contact with them.

“They would have been able to find those logs had they checked on Dec. 10 when they looked for the e-mail access results,” he said.

In an interview on Jan. 15, Dunne said he was unsure about when exactly he was first contacted by OIT senior policy adviser Rita Saltz about the logs following Wang’s initial e-mail to OIT, but he added that he believed the initial contact occurred “some time during the week of Dec. 15.” He also said that he did not fully understand the results of OIT’s investigation until the meeting on Jan. 7.

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Saltz declined to comment.

While Wang said that his e-mail to OIT requested access logs, Dunne explained that logs were not specifically discussed until after winter break.

“The way this log question came up, it literally came up in the meeting we had in person [on Jan. 7], and it was deep into the conversation with OIT people,” Dunne said. “It came up late in the conversation, and it was the first time it was raised.”

Over winter break, OIT investigated whether it was possible to track who accessed the election site, Dunne said, adding that the logs of these access times were not brought up until Jan. 7, when it was too late to retrieve them.

“[The logs weren’t] discussed between the 10th of December and the seventh of January,” he said.

There is some confusion surrounding this gap of time between the original complaint and the “usual maintenance” performed by OIT that resulted in the deletion of the logs.

University spokeswoman Emily Aronson said in an e-mail that the logs were deleted after one week “per standard OIT procedure.”

“For a short term [OIT saves] log-in access information accounts, but because of the volume, OIT says we don’t save those long term,” Dunne said. He attributed the extended timeline of the investigation to winter break, when many people involved, including himself, were away from campus.

Weinstein criticized the length of the investigation, adding that students were concerned about the administration’s role in this election.

“I would like to question why the investigation wasn’t done sooner,” Weinstein said. “Had I been the one doing the investigation, there wouldn’t have been over a week of delay. Maybe they knew the logs weren’t going to be there.”