Casey Manzella
Reporter
Students quickly discovered they could vote more than once for their prefered candidates when the ballot for this year’s StuCo elections was sent to student e-mails this morning. With multiple students voting up to 30 times, all of today’s votes will be disregarded and a re-vote will be held tonight.
Technology and education teacher Cathy Swan recognized the problem in allowing students to submit numerous votes.“By using Google Forms we were not able to set it so that you could only vote once,” she said. “We had the American Idol situation where you can start voting at 9 PM and keep voting as many times as you want to until 1 AM.”
Junior candidate for Student Body Treasurer, Amanda Vitale, expressed her appreciation for Ms. Swan’s help in fixing the glitch. “I feel responsible for this mistake because I was in charge of creating the ballots,” she said. “It clearly wasn’t smart of me to assume that most people wouldn’t vote more than once. I am just glad Ms. Swan was able to take the time out of her day to help fix this problem.”
Additionally, after voting, students were able to see the results. “For the students, it was interesting to be able to see the results, but for the candidates it was crushing because they could see how many people did not vote for them,” said Ms. Swan.
Candidates had varying reactions to the voting mishap ranging from being unaware of the situation to taking advantage of the system. Junior candidate for Senior Class President, Caroline Muller, views the complications and the re-vote optimistically. “I’m hoping maybe people will think through their votes again and, who knows, maybe change their votes for the better,” Caroline said.
Sophomore candidate for Junior Political President, Erin Bucci, however, recognized the unequal opportunities the glitch created. “I think people just thought they should do whatever it takes to win the election,” she said. “It makes sense, but its unfair because not everybody has the same amount of time to keep voting for themselves.”
Ms. Swan similarly felt that students’ reactions were understandable. “To be fair, if adults went to the polls and could vote for their presidential candidate 100 times, we would have people being dragged away from the booths,” she said. “There’s nobody in any election who wouldn’t vote more than once if they were in a situation where they thought it was okay to do that.”
Ms. Swan has created another survey which has been sent out to students’ school emails. This new survey was created through K-12 Insight, a professional online survey instrument. Amanda sees the improvements with the new system. “This ballot will not allow people to vote more than once, nor will it show the results of the elections.”
