A day after the scheduled start of Undergraduate Council elections, council leadership has nearly finalized an arrangement with College administrators to allow voting to begin.

Council President Sujean S. Lee ’03 said the council hopes to begin elections by noon today.

Chair of the council’s Election Commission Nancy A. Redd ’03 wrote in a message to the council’s e-mail list last night saying that elections will run through 10 a.m. Friday. The election had originally been scheduled to end tomorrow at 11:59 p.m.

Every undergraduate will receive an e-mail containing a secure personalized link to a website on which they can cast their vote.

The e-mail will be sent out after the council is given student identification data from the registrar’s office.

Lee said both the registrar’s office and the Office of the Dean of the College had approved the new voting arrangement.

Concerns about the security of the council’s planned Web-based voting system caused the administration Monday afternoon to block the elections’ start, said Associate Dean of the College David P. Illingworth ’71.

“We had worked on this all last week. They knew there was a problem with using an off-site server,” Illingworth said. “I told Sujean last week that the elections couldn’t go forth at this point. She knew this was an issue last week.”

Lee, on the other hand, said that the council had little advance notice.

“Despite the fact that Susan Cooke and the administration was aware and supportive of our efforts, they waited until this past week to voice these concerns, giving us very, very little time to address them,” she said.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 indicated he “was a bit surprised” to learn of Lee’s criticism of the College administration.

“The main thing now is to avoid blame-casting if possible and to get the election underway,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Council members met with Registrar Arlene F. Becella and Associate Dean of the College Georgene B. Herschbach yesterday to discuss arrangements for a system that would meet security protocol, said council Technology Coordinator Jared S. Morgenstern ’03.

The delay marks yet another in a series of technology-related postponements to council elections, according to former council President Paul A. Gusmorino ’02. While this year’s delay is the longest in the past four years, the council’s fall 1998 election had to be entirely rerun because of technology glitches.

The Roots of the Problem