USG elections audit uncovers error; Class of 2012 Senate seat vacated

Class of 2012 senator Becca Lee will vacate her seat after it was discovered that hundreds of votes were disregarded in last December’s election because of a software glitch, USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 announced in an e-mail to the freshman class sent at 1:18 a.m. on Sunday.

While the original results 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 the votes that were initially disregarded.

“As Yaroshefsky was technically the highest vote getter, he was told that he could assume the role of senator if he so chooses,” Diemand-Yauman said in the e-mail. “Yaroshefsky, however, preferred to continue serving in the capacity of IT Chair. Consequently, Becca Lee’s 2012 senatorial seat is now technically vacant.”

Yaroshefsky said in an e-mail that, though he was “excited” to learn the actual outcome of last December’s election, he was also “disappointed that something as serious as this [glitch] could have slipped by.”

“The USG’s uphill battle to gain credibility surrounding elections just got steeper,” he said, adding that he chose to stay in his position as IT chair because “technology is critical to the daily operation of the USG.”

“Serving as IT Chair is always fast-paced and exciting,” he explained. “I believe I can affect the most positive change for the University by continuing to serve as IT Chair.”

Students who wish to serve as Class of 2012 senator may now apply for the position, and Diemand-Yauman and Class of 2012 president Lindy Li will appoint the new senator from the applicants, pending confirmation by the USG Senate.

Lee said in an e-mail that she was "disappointed" on hearing the news but added that she had "really enjoyed" her time as senator and plans to apply for the position, to finish out the year.

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After finding errors in the results of a survey in this spring’s USG ballot gauging student opinion of the University administration, USG officials conducted an audit of all elections dating back to 2002.

“The recent failures of the elections program in recent elections have brought to light many vulnerabilities in the system,” Diemand-Yauman explained. “To ensure that similar problems did not arise in elections of previous administrations, we began to audit past elections.”

The election for Class of 2012 senator was the only election in which an error was found, he added.

All involved parties were privately notified of the error following its discovery, according to an internal USG report on the audit.

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The error occurred because senate candidate Quintillo Rose ’12 had requested that his name appear on the 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.

“It is unusual for there to be quite this many error messages,” the USG report stated. “Because the vote counts for this election were not released, the fact that there were not counts for Sakellaris and Yaroshefsky presumably went unnoticed.”

According to the USG report, 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 results for all other elections and referenda were unaffected, Diemand-Yauman said.

“The audit consisted of a thorough two-pass manual inspection of all previous ballots recorded in the system," he explained. “Any other errors would have generated a similar error signature that would have been easily detected.”

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.

“When I first took office as USG president in February, one of my top priorities was to reform elections procedures in light of numerous elections-related complications that occurred in years past,” Diemand-Yauman said. “We will continue our efforts to implement a new, more reliable system for future elections ... We hope to have this system ready for next year’s elections.”