ASUCD voting hit its second highest turnout on record last week. This occurred despite a three-and-a-half-hour downtime on Thursday night. The downtime was compensated for with an additional three and a half hours of voting time on Friday morning.
This was an appropriate response by the Elections Committee. By extending the election timeframe an additional three-and-a-half hours, students were allotted the full 48 hours of voting time. Although it is unfortunate that the website malfunctioned, this is beyond the control of ASUCD and Creative Media. It was the Kerberos login system, also used by Smartsite and MyUCDavis amongst others, that prevented the elections website from working.
As reported in Monday’s article “Election results announced Friday,” after the results were announced some chose to decry Joe Chatham and Chris Dietrich’s narrow margin by chanting “Who’s my president? Lula,” referring to the opposing ticket. One student went so far as to say that this election was not democratic. This is preposterous.
Others complained that error resulting in the early availability of the returns compromised the viability of the election results. However, the information was available to all – thus, it did not give an unfair advantage to any one candidate.
Problems happen; when you have trouble logging into Smartsite, you don’t accuse the university of holding back your academic progress. This election glitch should be seen as nothing more than a computer problem.
We congratulate both executive tickets on running professional campaigns. Hopefully supporters will continue in the candidates‘ tradition and respect the election results.
