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Eric DeGrass spent a better part of his days earlier this week answering nonstop phone calls and some 200 e-mails from students wondering why they couldn’t vote.
DeGrass, who is the chair of the fair elections practices commission, had the responsibility of informing the student body at the University of Maine that the FirstClass system used to facilitate the election had, in fact, crashed.
“Today’s been a lot better than Monday,” DeGrass said on Wednesday afternoon, still taking calls and answering e-mails about the election.
The system currently in use by the FEPC to handle the ballots was designed by recent UMaine grads and sold to Student Government.
In previous years, the system was set up so that the voting icon appeared on FirstClass desktops well before the election began. This year, Information Technology attempted to send it out on Monday morning.
“IT tried to do it during the day when the server is highly taxed,” DeGrass said. “It overloaded it and it crashed.”
The voting situation wasn’t straightened out until about 2:30 p.m. on Monday, at which time DeGrass thought it better just to call off the election for that day.
“The window of voting had passed and I thought it would be better to reschedule the election,” DeGrass said.
DeGrass explained that when an application is added to all students’ desktops, it consumes an incredible amount of the FirstClass system’s memory.
To avoid the system crashing again on Wednesday, students received the icon on their FirstClass desktops in groups beginning at 2 a.m. on Wednesday morning, DeGrass said.
Problems did arise on Wednesday morning, though. At about 9:30 a.m. that morning, DeGrass began to get e-mails and phone calls from students saying they were still having trouble voting.
DeGrass and IT then reset the collected data from the 1,193 students who had been able to vote Wednesday morning and reset the permissions for the voting icon.
The whole process was remedied in 20 minutes and by 10:05 a.m., students were able to vote again. The deadline for students casting ballots was also moved back from 5 p.m. to 6 p.m. to allow students who had trouble voting earlier extra time.
DeGrass said part of the problem surrounding the mishap with the voting system was the fact that he was new to the entire process. Also contributing was the fact that a new FEPC chair was dealing with a new director of the IT help center.
Before the election, some members of the senate had expressed concern about the validity of the electronic voting system.
Sen. Elizabeth Anderson said her major concern with the process was that there was no backup plan in the event of a crash, like the one on Monday.
“The main problem I had with what happened on Monday was that there wasn’t a plan B in case something went wrong,” Anderson said.
Anderson and DeGrass both said that something needs to be done to reform the FirstClass voting system and develop a standard procedure to follow in the event of a system failure or crash.
“It just needs to be done differently next time,” DeGrass said. “I will be doing guidelines for the next chairperson.”
Bangor Daily News