OUSU has conducted a recount of votes from this term’s elections, following the revelation that people who had already graduated were able to log in and vote. The results of the election were unaffected by the recount.
According to a statement made by OUSU, five students who were ineligible to vote in the elections and who should not have been able to vote logged into OUSU’s website and cast their votes.
The statement, which was published on OUSU’s website and sent to all candidates in the 2014 elections, reads, “For the current academic year, OUSU and the University have put in place a new and more secure system for ensuring OUSU has access to up to date and secure data about its student members. This involves the provision of data to OUSU by the university via a third-party IT support company. In this instance there was an error in the data transfer that left out information about students that should have allowed OUSU to automatically exclude graduated students from the elections.
“As a result, five students ineligible to vote in this year’s OUSU elections had their votes registered and cast. Having identified this issue, OUSU has re-counted the votes for each post and we are able to confirm that none of the results have changed as a result.
“The University and OUSU have already taken steps to ensure that this problem (which is particular to the election process only) will not arise in the future.”
In addition to publishing a statement, OUSU has removed its list of results and voting numbers from OUSU.org.
[mm-hide-text]%%IMG_ORIGINAL%%10677%%[/mm-hide-text]
Voting in this year’s elections was conducted on OUSU.org, after the original Mi-Voice system was abandoned. Mi-Voice was found to be unreliable after it was revealed that the result of last summer’s referendum on Oxford’s affiliation with NUS had been manipulated, and the referendum was declared void.
Earlier this term, a number of colleges were unhappy with OUSU’s handling of the situation, with one JCR Returning officer calling the fact that OUSU failed to keep JCRs up to date about the state of the voting system “chaotic and intolerable”.
Will Obeney, the first runner-up in the presidential election, tweeted his support for OUSU’s handling of the matter.
Delighted at fast response by @ousunews over issues with the statutory elections. http://t.co/UKV4NeAbbV
— Will Obeney (@WillObeney) December 5, 2014
Meanwhile, Becky Howe, the winning presidential candidate, commented, “It’s good to see that OUSU has responded very quickly to this unforeseeable problem, by conducting a recount, and investigating how to prevent such a situation from arising again.”
While most of the positions in this year’s race were unopposed, the election for Vice President (Access & Academic Affairs) was a close one. Greg Auger lost out to Cat Jones, despite winning almost 50 more first preference votes. In the end, the result was determined by second preference votes, though these numbers were not released.
