The council began using a Telnet-based voting system with its December 1996 presidential elections, and the system, called “ucvote,” was used until this year.

“Ucvote” was hosted on a server located in the basement of Holworthy Hall. Over time, numerous problems arose with the system.

“There wasn’t enough memory in the system,” Morgenstern said. “There wasn’t even a terminal interface. It was just a server in a room. We could only access it remotely.”

Lee said “ucvote” was “very limited” and “very hard to teach to another student.”

Last year, the council passed a bill allocating funds to technology updates.

Using funds designated in the bill, the council hired Morgenstern and Edward D. Lim ’02 to spend the past summer revamping the website and creating a Web-based voting system.

Morgenstern and Lim initially intended to set up the council’s website at www.theuc.com, but administrators disallowed that plan.

“The [University] didn’t like an affiliation with an apparently Harvard organization using a dot com address,” Morgenstern said.

So Lim and Morgenstern asked Harvard Computing Services (HCS) about finding a University-affiliated server to host the council’s website.

“We assumed, and perhaps we shouldn’t have, that we would be able to run a site based on HCS’s servers,” Morgenstern said.

On Sept. 15, according to Morgenstern, HCS told him that they would be unable to host the council’s secure voting website.

Morgenstern said he and Lim then looked into establishing a website with a harvard.edu component in its URL.

After reaching dead ends pursuing this option, Morgenstern said they set up www.ucelections.org.

According to Lee, Coordinator of Student Affairs Susan T. Cooke had indicated this website would not be rejected by the administration, since it didn’t have a .com address.

When administrators learned of the new website, the College took “a renewed interest” in the council’s attempt to store registrar’s data on non-Harvard servers, Morgenstern said.