Lee ’12 retains USG Senate seat

Class of 2012 senator Becca Lee has been appointed to complete her term after being forced to vacate her seat following the discovery of an error in the vote counts from last December’s election. USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 announced Lee’s appointment in an e-mail to the Class of 2012 on Sunday afternoon.

While the original results of the December election indicated that Lee and Julie Chang ’12 received the most votes, a USG audit found that Chang and USG information technology (IT) chair Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 were the race’s actual winners after accounting for votes that were initially disregarded.

Yaroshefsky was offered the opportunity to assume the post of senator for the rest of the term, but he declined and chose instead to remain IT chair.

Lee was then required to vacate her seat in the USG Senate, and students who wished to serve as Class of 2012 senator were invited to apply for the position. Diemand-Yauman and Class of 2012 president Lindy Li reviewed nine applications and nominated Lee to the position. Lee was recently confirmed by the USG Senate, Diemand-Yauman said.

The vote tabulation error occurred because candidate Quintillo Rose ’12 had requested that his name appear in last December’s ballot as Quintillo “Q” Rose.

“The algorithm developed by OIT that interprets the raw elections data and outputs the final vote counts malfunctioned when it encountered an unexpected character (quotations marks) in one of the candidates’ names,” Diemand-Yauman explained. “The system ignored any candidates that appeared alphabetically after this error occurred.”

Since the software stopped reading each ballot when it encountered the first quotation mark in Rose’s name, it did not count any of the votes for Yaroshefsky or Andreas Sakellaris ’12. The glitch led to 392 error messages that were not discovered by then-senior elections manager Braeden Kepner-Kraus ’10.

The initial vote count showed that, of the 10 candidates, Chang had the most votes with 58 votes while Lee came in second with 50. The audit, after accounting for the disregarded votes, found that Yaroshefsky received 195 votes, far surpassing Chang’s 95 votes and Lee’s 70 votes.

The USG announced earlier this month that it would be designing a new elections software system this summer. The system, estimated to cost between $7,500 and $15,000, is scheduled to be used for a decade.