A relatively new internet-based voting system and a dated constitution complicated the Student Senate Election Task Force’s already difficult job of resolving a tie during last week’s spring Student Senate election, stirring dissatisfaction among some of those involved in the current electoral process.

At midnight on Sunday, Feb. 27, the task force confirmed that there was a tie between candidates Matthew Adler and Divya Hemnani for the seventh and final seat in the student senate. The senate constitution, created in 1997 and outdated enough that the spring election now occurs at a different time in the semester than the constitution dictates, offered no provisions for the case of a tie.

At the senate’s plenary session that Sunday the task force, pressed to resolve the tie quickly, chose to hold a runoff election from Monday, Feb. 28 until midnight on Wednesday, March 2, with a quorum requirement that at least 20 percent of the student body vote.

“At the upcoming Wednesday general faculty meeting, a very important vote on the strategic planning committee is taking place,” said Student Senate Communications Coordinator Jonathan Bruno, a sophomore and the only senator authorized to speak for the senate as a whole. “Ideally, all 15 student senators would be there to vote. The senate chose the most democratic, fair way to deal quickly with the situation.”

Some candidates expressed dissatisfaction with the task force’s choice of a runoff election.

“A runoff election is not always fair,” said senior Curtis Ferguson II, former student senator and candidate for this spring’s election. “The problem is, there is no constitutional memory within the senate. In last spring’s election, when it looked as if we would have a tie, instead of having a runoff, Senate extended the elections for two more days.”

“There are no by-laws to cover a tie for the last available spot,” said senior Jon Argaman, a member of the election task force. “There is a nasty problem with turnover on the senate, and a lot of precedent gets lost because there are no bylaws.”

“This is also a learning experience for everybody,” said Shozo Kawaguchi, Oberlin’s associate dean of student life and faculty advisor to the student senate. “We do our best to ensure things go smoothly, but unexpected situations like the runoff still come up. I know some senators had sleepless nights working on it and I commend them for doing so.”

The runoff situation gained complexity Monday, Feb. 27, when the e-mail containing the link to the runoff ballot was caught in CIT’s spam mail filter. The election task force sent out an e-mail later that evening explaining to students how to access the ballot, but some candidates expressed concern that the ballot’s lack of accessibility compromised students’ ability to vote.

“Lots of people delete their spam mail without looking at it. A friend just told me she deleted the e-mail without reading it,” said Matt Adler, a runoff candidate.

Sophomore Divya Hemnani, the other runoff candidate, encountered trouble when she attempted to deal with the spam problem.

“I unquarantined my ballot and sent a link to people I know,” Hemnani said. “Later, I got a call from Jon Argaman saying what I’d done had caused technical problems. It turns out I’d sent the link to my own ballot and everyone who used it was just resending my vote over and over.”

“I regret very much that the runoff ballot was caught by the spam filter, but that being said, the student senate had no direct control over that situation,” Bruno said. “Despite the fact the e-mail was caught by the spam filter, hundreds of students are responding.”

In an interview, Ferguson raised concern over another tie-related problem. According to Ferguson, at 6:15 p.m. on Saturday evening, six hours before the election officially ended, he received a text message from a fellow candidate who had just been informed that he had won a senate seat.

Bruno confirmed that the senate contacted two of the candidates before the election ended Saturday night to tell them that they had most likely won senate seats and ask if they would accept.

“Under the best possible circumstances, no candidate would be informed of anything until the end of the elections,” Bruno said, speaking of Senate’s decision to contact the two senators. “In this election, we saw there was a tie situation. There was a thought among some members that if a winner were to turn down a seat, the tie situation could be resolved. A senator informed the two candidates who had received by far the most votes.”

“The problem is, there were a lot of mistakes made in the system that could have changed the election results,” said Ferguson. “The task force should have been upfront about it since the election was so close!”

Many of the problems that arose in this spring’s election seemed to have stemmed from problems with the aged constitution and the new online voting system.

“The constitution is really old — so logically, there are a lot of problems with it,” said Bruno.

“Just as the United States constitution has amendments based on the nation’s experience, the senate’s constitution also needs to be amended from time to time,” said Kawaguchi.

The senate plans to address many of the concerns raised during the election at the senate’s upcoming plenary meeting on Sunday, March 6, where, according to the communications coordinator, the senate will take up the issue of election reform.

Adler said before the runoff results were announced that “coming into the election, I was not concerned with the voting procedure. Now, if I become a senator, this is definitely something I want to work to change.”

He went on ultimately to win the runoff.

While Kawaguchi predicted that changes could be made to the constitution this year if senators take the issue up, the senate plans to keep the electronic ballot system.

“The bottom line is, while there are legitimate concerns over internet-based elections, in the end they are much more inclusive,” said Bruno, referring to the fact that voter participation has more than doubled since voting has gone from paper to electronic format. “More students end up having a say. In my book and in the senate’s book, that’s an improvement.”