SGA voting scrutinized

Marcus Ditty
Editor in Chief

Florida is facing another election controversy, this time the University of West Florida’s Student Government Association is the center of attention. On Tuesday, presidential candidate Robert Kelley filed an official appeal with the Elections Commission concerning the SGA election held April 13 through 14.
“ There are two issues involved in this appeal,” said Doug Pearson, associate vice president for student affairs. “One is whether the computer system is flawed, and the other is whether there were election code violations. My hope is to give this its due diligence, and handle it expiditiously.”
UWF utilizes a computerized voting system available to students via the internet. The system requires users to log in with their compass/nautical login and pin number.
This same system is utilized for many campus-wide surveys conducted throughout the year and has been in place for approximately four years.
The software is designed to allow one vote per ID, said Martha Hancock, SGA office assistant. During the election, a flaw in the software allowed users to submit multiple votes while logged on to the system.
The system has not undergone many changes since its inception, said Charles Henning, Information Technology Services Nautical programmer.
While the actual software governing the election has not been changed, the underlying components and the database it interfaces with have been modified, Henning said.
“ They changed the way the database processed info, and it changed the way our software reacted,” Henning said.
" People could click the back button and resubmit their answers until they logged out of the system."
The code has now been modified to prevent this from happening in the future, Henning said.
Kelley first got word of this flaw during the election from other students. Kelley said he was concerned over this and decided to check for himself.
“ Saturday night, I tested the system using the Greek week survey,” said Kelley. “The next morning, I received an e-mail from the administrator of the Greek week survey, questioning how I had submitted the survey 16 times.”
The SGA will completely discard any votes from users who submitted more than twice, and will only count the first vote of users that voted twice or less, Hancock said.
“ We are doing that because it was very easy to have made a mistake,” said Hancock.
The number of duplicate votes cast were not available at press time.
The appeal and Kelley’s allegation of code violations will now be resolved by the Elections Commission, a group of indviduals chosen by the current SGA president sometime in late February.
“ I want to make sure that everyone’s votes count and give confidence to those voting that they are making a difference,” Kelley said.