Student-government elections saw a second delay Thursday after unsuccessful attempts to fix technical problems by a noon deadline pushed the voting into next week.
Voting on Associated Students of Madison candidates and two student referenda were postponed Wednesday after technical errors in the online ballots rendered results invalid.
Voting on referenda was to resume Thursday at noon, but according to Brian Rust, from the UW-Madison Department of Information Technologies, technicians were unable to reprogram the system in time.
Rust said problems with the voting system caused error messages for students trying to list multiple write-in candidates for the same seat.
Rust said an upgrade to the system, performed months ago, caused the failure of a feature that was supposed to allow voters to write in multiple candidates.
When the database was upgraded last year, that feature broke, and for whatever reason it was missed by both DoIT and ASM in testing,\ Rust said.
But Rust said these problems were fixed, and the new system, planned by the ASM Student Election Commission, will discard votes for candidates but will keep votes on the living wage and Union reconstruction referenda.
This decision met a mixed response from interested groups. Opponents saw the move as anti-democratic, while proponents said anything else would disenfranchise voters.
UW-Madison junior Joel Feingold, a member of the Student Labor Action Coalition, which sponsored one of the referenda, approved of the decision.
""There can be no due process when legitimated and valid ballots are thrown out,"" Feingold said.
The committee also decided to delay voting until next week, with voting on referenda taking place from Monday to Tuesday, and voting for ASM representatives delayed until Wednesday and Thursday.
This decision was reached as a compromise after an extremely heated meeting Wednesday night that culminated in the committee's chair, UW-Madison sophomore Tim Leonard, calling the police.
In its meeting Thursday, the SEC decided to reimburse all declared candidates with $40 and free chalk for any possible harm caused by the election system's failure.
""If there's something we can do to lessen the burden of having a new election, I think we should do that,"" said Josh Tyack, a UW-Madison sophomore and vice chair of the committee.
But other groups looking for retribution from the SEC could further complicate the elections in the days and weeks to come.
Several groups filed suits with the Student Judiciary Committee, challenging the legality of the election compromise. The results of these cases could overturn SEC's latest efforts.\
