The Student Elections Committee decided to halt the Associated Students of Madison candidate election for a second time, throw away all the existing votes and construct a new election system within the next few days, in response to a Department of Information Technology report that 436 of the electronic votes were invalid Wednesday night.
DoIT contacted SEC when it discovered that the number of people who went into the system did not match the number of ballots it received. Four hundred and thirty-six electronic ballots were missing an actual vote. Error messages were issued for these tokens, and their votes were not counted.
The troubles come on the heels of last week's botched ASM elections, when a computer glitch brought all elections to a halt.
Around 10 p.m., SEC voted to stop the ASM elections, which were supposed to remain open until Friday.
In addition, they decided the results of the two initiatives voted on Tuesday, which resulted in decisions in favor of a Living Wage referendum and in opposition to the Wisconsin Union Facilities Improvement Plan referendum, would remain the same because the missing ballots would not have been enough to overturn either.
ASM president Eric Varney said he was completely and utterly displeased\ with DoIT's actions in the last 2 weeks. And although he asked SEC to ""please do an electronic election quickly and accurately,"" DoIT representatives said this plea was impractical.
""We won't guarantee anything with this current system and if you go looking for a new system, nothing is possible in a week,"" said Annie Stunden, chief information officer at DoIT. ""Anything electronic is not the answer. Paper is the solution.""
SEC head chair Tim Leonard confirmed, ""electronic voting will not happen in this election.""
Instead, the committee has vowed to create a paper ballot system where students would physically obtain a paper ballot in order to cast their vote and have their student identification number verified at a polling location.
As of now, SEC has not set an official date for the reopening of polls, but Leonard said SEC is ""shooting for next week.""\
