Princeton senate discovers voting errors in elections
Omar Carrillo; The Daily Princetonian, Princeton
Issue date: 5/28/09 Section: National College News
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.
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 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."
All involved parties were privately notified of the error following its discovery, according to an internal USG report on the audit.
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 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."
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