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Lee ’12 keeps seat after audit uncovers error

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

Yaroshefsky was appointed in February to serve as the USG information technology (IT) chair. USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman ’10 offered Yaroshefsky the opportunity to assume the post of senator for the rest of the term, but he declined and chose instead to remain IT chair.

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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 for the position. Lee was then confirmed by the USG Senate.

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.”

Discovering the mistake

After identifying 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.

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“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 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.

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“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.”

The initial vote count showed that, of the 10 candidates, Chang had the most votes with 58, 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.

No errors were found in the results of any of the other elections or referenda examined.

“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 in May 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.