Referendum results incorrect; senior elections manager resigns

No candidate elections were affected by the vote tabulation error, Cliatt explained, but the released results for all four questions on the referendum submitted by Kyle Smith ’09 were incorrect.

“The program that counts votes expected the assigned selection by each voter to be in ascending order, but the reverse was the case,” Cliatt explained. “While the program expected that a value of 1 in a yes-no question would be yes, in actuality the value was supposed to mean no.”

The USG has not yet released corrected results for the referendum, but Darling said it expects to announce those numbers by Dean’s Date.

Smith said that, after he noticed vast differences from last year in the responses to the referendum questions, he asked USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 for the responses broken down by class year. Diemand-Yauman then referred him to Jin, who is also a senior photographer for The Daily Princetonian.

After not hearing from USG representatives for some time, Smith said he e-mailed them again and received a response from Jin that said, “Something unexpected came up with the ballot formatting that affects the results of your referendum.”

Cliatt confirmed that the problem was discovered by officials from the Office of Information Technology (OIT) and reported to Jin.

“After the problem was discovered, OIT’s technician responsible for the application went into the database and changed all existing 1 values to 2 for all four parts of Referendum 1, then all 0 values to 1,” Cliatt explained. “These results will be now be recertified by the Office of the Registrar.”

Diemand-Yauman said the errors were “outside of the USG’s hands” and referred all questions to OIT.

“The problem really demonstrates the need to have an updated and thoroughly tested election process in place for future elections, which has been the subject of continuing talks between OIT and the USG,” Cliatt said. “And in fact, progress is being made on this front,” she added, explaining that OIT and the USG are working together on designing new elections software in a project sponsored by the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students.

“The goal is to eliminate any possibility of a similar problem arising in the future and to ensure a secure system,” Cliatt said.

Last week, the USG released election results showing that student approval of University administrators had risen dramatically since last year. According to those incorrect results, 68 percent of the more than 2,300 students who responded said they approve or strongly approve of “the way top-level administrators ... have been running Princeton.”

These responses showed an apparent increase in student approval of the administration from last year, when Smith’s referendum also appeared on the USG’s spring elections ballot. In 2008, 43.6 percent of the nearly 1,900 students who participated said that they approved or strongly approved of how top administrators managed the University.

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The reported results this year stated that 51 percent of students in this year’s election said they believe the “major decisions” those administrators have made in recent years have “led to an improvement in the overall quality of student life at Princeton,” but last year only 21 percent of student voters said they thought this was the case.

And according to the reported results this year, a full 75 percent said they feel top-level administrators “listen to student input while creating substantial campus policies.” Last year, only 18 percent of students who responded said they thought the administration listened to student concerns.