After contested election results, on Monday and Tuesday of this week Law school students will participate in a runoff election for the second of two Honor Committee Representative Positions available to Law school students.
The original election held last Monday and Tuesday included races for UJC representatives, Student Council representatives, and the Executive board of the Law School Student Bar Association -- the Law School's governing body -- along with Honor Committee representatives.
Unlike undergraduate elections, which are conducted online, Law school elections were administered using paper ballots. Although the University Board of Elections contacted the Law school in January about using the online voting system, the decision was made to keep the election on paper ballots through a compromise between the SBA and the UBE, according to SBA President Adam Greene.
Since work on the Law School elections was already in progress and turnout for Law School online surveys tends to be low, the SBA saw a paper election as more effective than one held online, Greene said.
Because of the UBE's authority in running all elections pertaining to UJC, the Honor Committee and Council, the law school could not constitutionally run elections for representatives to those bodies without the involvement of the UBE.
The results of last week's election came into question after officials realized that they had not checked the identification of one voter, leaving 465 votes cast and only 464 names checked off. The discrepancy would not have changed the results of any of the elections, aside from the second Honor Committee representative position.
In that race, Trevor McFadden won the first Honor representative position by a margin of 14 votes, but the two runners-up, Will Doffermyre and Randall Warden, were separated by only one vote.
Initially, a representative of the UBE agreed that the results of the UJC and Student Council representative races on Tuesday night could be released to the candidates, leaving only the Honor Committee race undecided. According to the UBE, the authorization to release the results of any of the races was rescinded later that night due to the inconsistency in the voting record and the fact that the entire board -- not just one representative -- must certify the election.
"We could not guarantee that there wasn't more widespread discrepancy," UBE chair Steve Yang said. "It casts doubts on the accuracy of all the results."
The UBE also decided that an entirely new election involving all the races was necessary before any results could be certified.
There was concern, however, that redoing all of the elections would undercut the authority of the Law School student body if the results of any of the unaffected races were to change, Greene said.
In response the SBA instead proposed a simple runoff between the second and third place candidates in the Honor Committee representative race.
Although the UBE did not certify the results of the original election, the SBA released the results to the candidates, creating problems for the proposed new election, Yang said.
Following the release of the results, the UBE said it was forced to certify the results of the original election and also to agree to the SBA's proposed runoff in the disputed race because after the SBA released the results, losing candidates dropped out of the race.
Yang said he regrets the ambiguous results of the election and hopes that future elections involving UBE and the Law School will be run more effectively.
"This problem with the balloting signals the fact elections should be held online," Yang said.
Representatives of the SBA said that they would not be opposed to administering future elections online.
"The Law School is by no means closed to the idea," said Steve Kaplan, SBA vice president and elections commissioner. "The idea of an online election is promising but it would have to be discussed between the UBE and the vice president [of the SBA] next year."
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