USG looks to move on after series of troubled elections

“Moving forward, the USG needs to have some very serious conversations about whether the continued existence of the independent position of elections manager is viable,” USG president Connor Diemand-Yauman said in an Oct. 23 statement to The Daily Princetonian.

Replacing Darling are Honor Committee chair Peter Dunbar ’10, Class of 2010 president Aditya Panda and Class of 2011 president and Honor Committee clerk Alex Rosen. Dunbar will serve as the senior elections manager, Diemand-Yauman said.

Though the three will only preside over one election, they are already anticipating the challenges that come along with the position.

“At face value, it seems like it should be pretty easy,” Dunbar said, noting that he has never before been involved in USG elections. “But given the events of the last couple years in which very competent people have made mistakes, it seems that it is a challenging role, and that we will have to be on guard to make sure these things go smoothly.”

A rocky year of elections

Reflecting on her time as senior elections manager, Sophie Jin ’11 suggested that the job was more challenging and less rewarding than it appeared. Jin is also a senior photographer for The Daily Princetonian.

“Frankly, it’s a very poorly compensated position for all of the work and trouble that people have to go through for it,” Jin said. “It’s a position that takes a lot of time and a lot of stress, and it doesn’t generate a lot of goodwill.”

In December 2008, then-senior elections manager Braeden Kepner-Kraus ’10 resigned following confusion over the USG vice presidential election. Kepner-Kraus had originally called for a revote after president Josh Weinstein ’09 sent out an e-mail endorsing Mike Weinberg ’11 for the vice presidency. The USG senate overturned Kepner-Kraus’ decision in an emergency closed executive session, and Weinberg was named the vice president, according to the results of the original vote. Kepner-Kraus subsequently stepped down. Then, in January, a USG investigation called for another revote to be held in February. Weinberg’s opponent, Nick DiBerardino ’11, subsequently withdrew his name from contention, handing Weinberg the vice presidency.

In an interview this week, Kepner-Kraus said he resigned because he did not want to be involved with the fallout from the elections confusion. “I stepped down before the end of my term, but after the last election I was conducting,” he explained. “That was mostly because I didn’t want to be involved in what I saw as an unnecessary investigation of Josh’s conduct after the fact, which I think history will bear out was unnecessary and divisive, especially in terms of the recancelled revote later in the spring.”

Kepner-Kraus’ replacement, in Jin, also failed to complete her term. She resigned last May after mistakes were found in the results of a referendum submitted by Kyle Smith ’09.

Jin explained that the mistakes were a result of a flaw in the elections software, which had been in place for the previous year’s referendum voting.

“The code for the ballot that had been submitted last year had some mistakes in it that made it so that when we tabulated the results, the wrong numbers were showing up for the wrong results,” she said in an interview. “Because we used the same ballot the next year, the same mistakes carried over, so both of the years’ results were incorrect.”

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“But the reasons I resigned last year had less to do with the software and those sorts of errors, than the [reaction] after,” she added.

Darling, who was then Jin’s assistant elections manager, then assumed the role following Jin’s resignation.

But in May, a USG elections audit revealed yet another serious voting tabulation error that had changed the results of the Class of 2012 senate elections, held during Kepner-Kraus’ tenure. Candidate Quintilio Rose ’12 had requested that his name appear on the ballot as Quintilio “Q” Rose.

When the voting algorithm encountered the unexpected quotation-mark character it automatically ignored every vote cast for any of the candidates listed alphabetically after Rose: Michael Yaroshefsky ’12 and Andreas Sakellaris ’12. The glitch led to 392 error messages that were not discovered by Kepner-Kraus. This led to Becca Lee receiving the seat, which should have gone to Yaroshefsky.

Then, during the Class of 2013 elections earlier this month, Darling misspelled the e-mail addresses of two vice presidential candidates, resulting in their receiving incomplete information about election protocol. The statements of candidates Jamie Joseph ’13 and Jonathan Hezghia ’13 were only posted on the USG voting website after the election had already begun and Hezghia’s name was misspelled on the ballot as “Hezghin.”

Joseph explained that when she logged on to vote, she did not see her photo and platform on the voting site. She then e-mailed Darling and usgvote@princeton.edu, asking whether Darling had remembered to upload Joseph’s platform. Within five minutes, USG information technology chair Yaroshefsky put her platform on the site, Joseph said.

Hezghia did not respond to requests for comment.

On Friday, Darling sent the Class of 2013 an e-mail explaining her mistakes, scheduling an Oct. 26 revote and announcing her resignation.

Connor Diemand-Yauman explained that once the problems with the election became clear, he and Darling met to determine how to proceed and they ultimately decided she should resign.

Looking ahead

Incoming elections manager Rosen said he thought Darling’s resignation was unfortunate, but added that he understood the USG’s wish to move forward.

“I do feel bad for Addie because the mistake was an oversight that was completely understandable,” he said. “But I also see what Connor’s motivation is [in asking her to resign]. He really wants to show a commitment to giving undergraduates an untainted election cycle. I think the primary reason is that there has been a lot of election reform in the last year, and all of it has been for the better. I think this little incident, even though it is not a huge deal, had the potential to detract from the elections reform.”

Panda said he thought his new job would not be focused on past errors, because the USG has moved on to using new elections software, which was first used this fall in the election for the Class of 2013 officers.

“The system that we used for tabulating results is very complicated and very technical, probably more so than it should be,” Jin said. “[It is] something we hadn’t created ourselves but ended up creating a lot of problems for us … being elections manager, though, we do end up taking a lot of the blame for the system that is in place, that we don’t have the resources to change.”

Panda also suggested that the system was partly to blame. “Any time you have a system that’s old, you’re going to have issues come up as the needs of students change over time. If you look at the system, it was meant for a different era. I’m glad we’re moving forward into a newer elections system.”

Issues of constitutionality

With his appointment of Dunbar as senior elections manager, as well as Rosen and Panda as elections managers, Diemand-Yauman is bringing the elections process back in line with the USG Constitution for the first time since Jin was appointed last December.

Prior to February 2008, Weinstein had served simultaneously as senior elections manager and USG vice president until the USG voted unanimously to amend its constitution and create the position of an independent senior elections manager.

According to the February 2008 amendment to the USG constitution, “The President shall be responsible for selecting a Senior Elections Manager, with the approval of the Senate. An additional two Elections Managers shall be selected by the Senior Elections Manager in conjunction with the President.”

After the passage of the constitutional amendment and his election to the presidency, therefore, Weinstein appointed Kepner-Kraus to the position, the first senior elections manager appointed from outside the USG.

Following the stipulations of the amendment, Kepner-Krau said he was joined by Jin and Rahul Jha ’11 as elections managers. But by the time Jin took over for Kepner-Kraus, she only had one assistant: Darling.

After Jin’s resignation, Darling was left as the sole elections manager, which Darling said caused substantial issues in her capacity to complete the position’s tasks to the best of her ability.

“I think it’s just overextension, perhaps, and a little bit of the nature of the job itself as well,” she explained. “While no election will be perfect, we need to ensure a fair and valid election, and as such, elections managers need to be incredibly diligent in protecting the election’s integrity, and carefully monitor the entire process. As a general rule, many Princeton students are already involved in so many other activities that very few have the time to be completely dedicated to the process.”

Kepner-Kraus summed the position up in discouraging, if lighthearted, terms. “This is a job where the only time you know you’re doing everything right is when everybody’s angry at you, and the only time you know you’re doing everything wrong is when everybody’s angry at you,” he said. “The only time you know you’re wrong is when somebody’s happy.”