Computer foul-up mires CMU student elections
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The good news about Carnegie Mellon University's student government election this year is that voter turnout was up.
The bad news is that how those people voted may never be known.
All 1,933 ballots were rendered irretrievable by a computer foul-up that -- depending on you viewpoint -- illustrates the perils of electronic balloting or simply shows that technology can bedevil people, even on one of the nation's most tech-savy college campuses.
The late April election for officers included a four-way race for student body president. In light of the aborted tally, student leaders designated Germaine Williams to serve as interim student body president until a repeat election can be held in September.
Meanwhile, the university has launched an investigation through its offices of information security and student affairs. Some on campus got word of the matter in an e-mail that strongly suggested something underhanded had occurred.
"The electronic voting results are inaccessible due to suspected malicious behavior that involved tampering with the electronic key used to encrypt and decrypt the results," wrote Meg Richards, chair of the student government elections board, in the May 3 e-mail directed to the campus community.
In the days since, explanations of what happened have varied.
University spokeswoman Teresa Thomas said Tuesday that investigators found "there is no evidence that there was any intent to tamper with the election."
But yesterday, another spokesman, Ken Walters, said Carnegie Mellon now is not prepared to rule that or anything else out. "It's an open question. We're still investigating," he said.
Joel Bergstein, 21, a junior and chair of the undergraduate student senate, said that while someone apparently accessed the system "it was an accident. The person had no intention of doing anything to the system. It was not malicious."
Ms. Richards, 22, a senior from Nyack, N.Y., said she did not entirely agree with Mr. Bergstein's assessment but added that she could not comment on the investigation.
She said the votes are not lost but remain in a place where they cannot be retrieved, either. "It's so secure, we can't even open it," she said.
The student-developed system allows votes to be cast via the Internet once a student's identity has been authenticated. It previously crashed in 2004-05, Ms. Thomas said.
Michael Shamos, a Carnegie Mellon computer science professor who examines voting machines in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, was not familiar with the system used. But he said it's clear it did not represent the university's collective computer know-how.
"It doesn't say anything about electronic voting systems in general, except that amateurs shouldn't build them," he said.
Marybeth Kuznik, executive director of VotePA, a statewide alliance that supports voter-verified paper ballots, also was unfamiliar with the system used, but she said, "In general, elections are better if there is a voter-verified paper ballot because then you have something to recount if there is a problem."
First Published May 11, 2007 11:12 pm
