On March 19, online voting polls opened for the VUSAC election, for students to elect new and returning members into council. Upon the first few hours of the online program running, technical difficulties occurred and became problematic for students looking to place votes for the Board of Regents position, and the referendum.
Chief Returning Officer, Saambavi Mano, opened the polls for Victoria College students to vote for their chosen candidates at 12 AM on March 19. Only a few minutes later, Mano reported that the system had to be shut down to fix an error, and asked students to hold off casting votes for the time being. At 12:30 AM, students began to report that they were not seeing the option to vote in the VUSAC 2016 election on the main page of voting.utoronto.ca. Instead, the page only showed past elections that students were eligible to vote for.
Online voting system operations were stop and go until approximately 1 AM. At 1:20 AM, Assistant Chief Returning Officer, Seraphina Vasilodimitrakis-Hart, stated in the VUSAC 2016 Elections Forum Facebook group, “There is a problem with the voting lists that we received from voting.utoronto.ca. We’re trying to fix it right now. We’ll keep you updated as we fight the system.” Vasilodimitrakis-Hart then requested that those who had already voted cast their vote once again to validate it.
At 3:07 AM, Mano also posted on the Elections Forum Facebook page, where she clarified and updated voters on the issues occurring and steps to resolution. In addition to the system destroying the referendum, it had also taken away the ability to choose more than one Board of Regents representative, which did not allow for freedom of choice between all three candidates. The system also denied the start of a new election. Mano explained that VUSAC elections could continue until the end of the week, but there would have to be a separate election for the referendum and Board of Regents representatives.
The point of contact for solving the system errors at voting.utoronto.ca was missing until March 21, too long a period to delay the end of the elections. Because of the length of this delay, Mano implemented a separation of voting, where the referendum and Board of Regents would be voted upon around the following Sunday or Monday.
Mano announced that Board of Regents and levy referendum results would be released on March 29. All three candidates, Benjamin Atkins, Hannah Brennan, and Chris Knipe, were elected to the Board. Full election results can be found at http://www.vusac.ca/#!results/c1i9b.
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