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Student Government president and vice-presidential election marred by glitches

Posted on Dec. 08, 2008, at 12:00 a.m.

University of Maine Student Government elections are over – but not without a hitch.

Technical issues with FirstClass delayed the election by a day, and some students complained they did not get the voting icon on their desktops. Many voters could not see Question 1 – delaying the voting on it by at least one semester. Complaints also include the lack of advertisement of the election’s delay.

After a day of trying to figure out the technical difficulties and answering approximately 300 e-mails from students on Tuesday, Tavian MacKinnon, The Fair Election Practices Commission chair, is still unsure of why voting icons did not show up on some students’ desktops.

The Fair Elections Practices Commission will actively investigate why this happened. It met Thursday at 3:30 p.m. to discuss complaints filed by candidate Robert Goodwin. Goodwin’s complaint was that some students were unable to vote. FEPC guidelines dictate a ballot box be in the Wade Center in case a student is unable to vote online. Four paper ballots were cast in this election.

“I feel strongly that something needs to be done now about it,” Goodwin said in the meeting. He suggested voting be re-opened briefly for the students unable to vote on Tuesday. This suggestion was denied.

“The funny thing is, all the list of students that are in the elections is the activity paying students from the Office of Student Records, so for some reason, some students weren’t on it – maybe they weren’t activity fee-paying students – that information is confidential; we don’t really know. But it seems to be that the Office of Student Records’ records weren’t accurate. And I really don’t know why that is, because that’s the official record keeping of UMaine.”

Undergraduate students can opt out of the student activity fee.

Question 2 passed. The question, according to Student Government President James Lyons, was not the wording approved by senate. This question revoked the student body president’s veto power senate gave him last semester.

Question 1′s votes were not counted because technical issues kept many students from reading the question. Question 1 read: “Shall the Constitution of Student Government Inc. be amended to remove the use of an initiative to appropriate funds or to designate any person to hold public office or to remove any person from public office?”

Another technical issue was that candidates’ names that were supposed to be in the random order drawn in a senate meeting earlier last month were in a different arrangement.

“I don’t think it really matters [in terms of] the outcome of the vote, personally. It’s more of a tradition, more for the candidates. The real importance of the order is for the debate, because it’s the basis of who speaks at the debate – who speaks first, who speaks last,” MacKinnon said.

“Beside the technical [issues] we faced with running it on FirstClass, they went very well. All the candidates ran a good election, they followed the guidelines to the Tee,” MacKinnon said.

Voter turnout was up approximately 13 percent from last year.

“It [voter participation] was, I think, 8 percent [last year]; it was low,” McKinnon said. This year, MacKinnon estimated participation at 21.3 percent of undergraduate activity fee-paying students. He attributed the participation to the candidates. “Owen, Gimbala and Rob all campaigned very hard and advertised. And the media, you guys covered the election pretty extensively.” All three campus media outlets – The Maine Channel, WMEB and The Maine Campus – held interviews with the candidates.

This year 5.19 percent of the presidential votes went to write-ins. There was no write-in candidate. Last year write-ins took 13.59 percent of the vote, when the election was between William Pomerleau and Sean Rankin.

“I think it is representative of Student Government, on the whole, growing and just improving as an organization,” Mackinnon said about the write-in difference between last and this year.

FEPC guidelines state: “If a referendum is conducted using the FirstClass Intranet voting system, a complete version must be made available using that system for three days prior to the vote.”

“We ran into problems with that because it couldn’t be done. You can’t send a mass e-mail with the referendum questions two days before. As I’ve said many times before, the FEPC Guidelines need to be heavily re-worked.”

Last year, the vote icon was posted to students’ desktops days before the vote, which allowed voters to read the referendum questions. “For some reason, you can’t do it this year,” MacKinnon said.

“My main concern with the election was actually getting it on FirstClass, ensuring that. I know there have been instances in the past where the election was supposed to be on FirstClass, and when election day came around, it just didn’t appear,” the FEPC chair said.

MacKinnon is stepping down from FEPC chair after being elected to Inter-Fraternity Council president. He would like to remain as chair, but can not due to Student Government regulations.

Other FEPC members did not respond to interview requests by press time.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.