WebCT polls will reopen at noon today for a runoff election between UCS presidential candidates Joel Payne '05 and Ari Savitzky '06, just 10 hours after extended voting hours ended.
In other races, Charley Cummings '06 was elected vice president, Adam Deitch'05 was elected UFB chair and Thilakshani Dias '05 was elected UFB vice chair.
Members of the Election Board would not reveal whether Payne or Savitzky came in first. Election Board members released the percentages of votes attained by the presidential candidates but would not say which candidates received those percentages. The top two candidates garnered 47.9 percent and 23.6 percent of the 2,823 votes cast; the third and fourth-place candidates earned 23.1 and 5.5 percent, respectively.
As the results were announced at about 3:30 a.m. to a crowd of about 50 people at Faunce House, Savitzky called for UCS election reform, saying that students have a right to know who came in first and second.
Outgoing UCS President Rahim Kurji '05 told The Herald that releasing how many votes candidates earned would "bias the vote." He would not say whether Payne or Savitzky came in first.
In an election night saga that dragged well into Thursday, members of the Undergraduate Council of Students Election Board were forced to first reopen the polls from 1 to 2 a.m. after the WebCT polling site became inaccessible and then, after the final results came in, to plan today's runoff.
UCS Corporation Liaison Sam Hodges '04, a member of the Elections Board, said the board decided to not release who earned what percentages "to make the information available to voters essentially the same as before the election, only with two of the candidates removed from the field."
"Basically, we want the runoff election to come as close as possible (to the original election), only with two people on the ballot," Hodges said.
Hodges said Election Board officials feared that if they announced who got the most votes in the original election, it could taint the runoff vote.
Students might make the "choice to go with the underdog" or otherwise change their vote, he said. "There are a huge number of hypothetical bounds. ... It's much better just to say, 'Here are the people who got the higher number of votes' but not say which ones."
Groups who made official endorsements during the first round of voting will not be able to endorse candidates in the runoff or send official e-mails. Similarly, Payne and Savitzky are not allowed to publicize their runoff campaigns.
But both Payne and Savitzky said they plan to canvass the community and encourage as many students to vote as possible.
"I don't want a runoff election with less voters or that is less legitimate than the original," Savitzky said.
Savitzky told The Herald early Thursday that members of the Election Board informed him privately that he finished first in the race.
He added that he was concerned that voter turnout for the runoff would be low, saying that "if 500 people vote in this run-off, and I got 1,100 votes the first time" he would be "very disturbed."
Payne, upon hearing that Savitzky had been told that he earned 47.9 percent, said, "I think it's irresponsible that the Elections Board would leak that information."
"I would hope that's not the norm of the Elections Board, that those leaks kind of stop now," he said.
In other races, David Bronfman, Katrina Chang, Benjamin Creo, Wiliam Cunningham and Divya Kumaraiah were elected Class of 2007 representatives. Megan Furnari, Evan Layne, Nicholas Monu and Sameer Khan ran uncontested for Class of 2006 representatives, and Vance Hynes, Rob Montz, Ryan Roth, Schuyler Von Oeyen and Katharine Shuster ran uncontested for Class of 2005 representatives.
- With reports by Dana Goldstein
