The Student Senate, mirroring one of the major national political debates, held student elections this year online, with mixed results. The Student Senate paid $250 for the online survey service, provided by Survey Monkey.
Student Senator Joshua Chaisson won the election for Student Body President with 42 percent of the vote. He also won an at-large seat on next year’s 34th Student Senate, which he has declined. Sergio H. Descart, who came in seventh place for at-large, will fill Chaisson’s seat. Joining Descart as newcomers to the Student Senate is Laura A. Saia, also at large, David C. Colson and Daniel Lawrence, both resident, and Janine M. Gorham and Fred Fridman, both commuters.
Christopher O’Connor, assistant to the dean of student life, found the results to be positive in the number of students who voted. “Two years ago there were 200 people voting in student elections,” he said. The elections drew 657 valid votes. “This year there were 100 more [votes] than last year.”
Following the posting of the election results, third place presidential contender Joshua Force, sent an e-mail to The Free Press and spoke with O’Connor, raising concerns about the discrepancies of the number of votes cast and the recorded number of hits to the website.
The website recorded approximately 1500 hits while only 715 ballots were cast.
“There wasn’t really a discrepancy,” said O’Connor If [the counter] was just registering the IP addresses of around 1300 computers, and only IP address, then the concern was: ‘why did we only have 657 verified ballots and 715 submitted votes?'” According to O’Connor, the difference between the votes was related to interested parties checking the website multiple times throughout the voting period. “I probably looked at the page 40 times,” he said. “[Ezekiel Kimball] probably looked at the page 50 times.”
Although he feels it would be inappropriate to challenge the election results at this point in time, Force doesn’t fully agree with that outcome. “I feel like more people voted,” he said. “It seemed to me more people were involved this year. When the numbers came back I was kind of surprise. We still don’t have solid numbers back from how many people hit the site.”
According to O’Connor, there were 715 votes, of which 58 were invalid. These included residential students who voted for commuter seats and vice versa, and non-students who voted. “There were two staff members that voted, so we booted them out,” said O’Connor