Glitch caused by multiple entries, not voting numbers, says DoIT
A group of students constituting a government that seeks to replace Associated Students of Madison demanded a full disclosure of the coding used to run ASM's faulty elections last week.
In a statement, UW-Madison senior Steve Schwerbel said the Division of Information Technology and ASM were not prepared for the high voter turnout and wants to examine the elections, which had to be postponed last Wednesday after technical difficulties with the online ballot.
There's really a lack of responsibility and transparency and oversight on ASM right now, and we want to see who was responsible for this and we'll decide from there which actions we'll take,\ Schwerbel said.
Schwerbel, who claimed in the statement that the system was not sufficiently tested, said he had not spoken with a representative of DoIT.
ASM Student Elections Commission Chair and UW-Madison sophomore Tim Leonard said he had told Schwerbel he would ask DoIT for the source code information.
Leonard said DoIT does all the programming for their elections and the SEC helps test the system.
""Quite frankly, we assume that between ASM staff and DoIT that the programs work. I guess it is something that we sort of take for granted and obviously after this, definitely won't in the future,"" Leonard said.
According to DoIT spokesperson Brian Rust, the mistake occurred when voters tried to enter more than one candidate in the write-in sections, not due to too many voters, as he said student government and members of the press had reported.
""I don't know whether they're trying to pitch it as primarily a success story, in terms of the overwhelming response, but that had nothing to do with the error that was uncovered,"" Rust said.
Leonard said the truth about what caused the election mishap has been obscured by speculation.
""I only wish that people would listen to us and not make up their own conjectures and make up their own stories,"" he said.
Rust said DoIT took responsibility for the error and has corrected it so ASM voting may reopen Monday.
Rust added that a student had approached him to discuss disclosure of the coding, and he said that information could likely be made available for public review.
""I'm not so sure that just because a few students say they could do a better job of coding that whatever they come up with wouldn't necessarily have an error in it either,"" he said.
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