CORRECTION APPENDED

At 10 p.m. last Thursday evening, the Undergraduate Council Election Commission convened in the dark at the steps of Widener library to engage in the annual rite of marching to the headquarters of the winning ticket and announcing the results.

For appearance’s sake, all was as it usually was. Voting had closed at noon that day, and the results had been certified by an oral vote of five of the seven-member Commission—which oversees the elections each year—six hours later. But after a few minutes of squabbling, Commission Chair Brad A. Seiler ’10 relocated the gathering to the Science Center for an impromptu meeting.

By midnight, Seiler and two other Commission members had abruptly resigned their posts, an e-mail to the Undergraduate Council open list (UC General) signed by the UC Vice President questioned the validity of the voting results and suggested possible vote tampering, and the presidential ticket of John F. Bowman ‘11 and Eric N. Hysen ’11, celebrating in its Pforzheimer belltower headquarters after the Crimson Web site erroneously announced their victory, had to be told that things were far from decided.

Three days after the ending of the closest Undergraduate Council presidential election in recent history, while the student body’s chief governing organization finalizes plans to pass judgment on vote tallies that remain decertified today, a series of interviews by The Crimson shed some light on the events that led to Friday’s confused outcome and the questions that may define the discourse on what remains to be done.

The picture that emerges is of a battle for the soul of an election that extends well beyond the candidates themselves, encompassing several former Council members—one of them now graduated—the current leadership, and the Commission itself.

On Tuesday, Nov. 10, former Student Affairs Committee Chair Tamar Holoshitz ’10 had an Internet chat with former UC Vice President Randall S. Sarafa ’09, in which he told Holoshitz that VP candidate Hysen, the technical director for the UC, had the passwords to access the voting software.

Holoshitz wrote to Seiler on Nov. 15, a day before voting opened, inquiring about the EC’s efforts to ensure that the software was monitored by others besides himself.

Seiler responded that he would bring the issue to the EC to decide.

On the same Sunday, Seiler wrote to both Hysen and current UC President Andrea R. Flores ’10 informing them that their access to the ucvote.web service had been revoked.

In later e-mails on Nov. 16, Seiler informed Holoshitz that it had been decided at an EC meeting earlier that day that all Commissioners would receive access to the voting software, and that he was at the time the only one who could access the voting software. But commissioners did not receive access to the software until Thursday after the election.

Holoshitz forwarded her e-mail, and Seiler’s subsequent responses, to both current UC Vice President Kia J. McLeod ’10 and former UC presidential candidate Benjamin P. Schwartz ’10, who lost in a bitter race against Flores last year. In these e-mails, she discussed with Schwartz the possibility of feeding a story about the voting software to a Crimson reporter.

Voting opened to the student body at noon on Nov. 16.

According to EC member Phillip Morris ’12, Seiler brought up at the EC meeting the following day—Monday—the possibility of a technological loophole that could allow outside parties to access the voting software.

There are two ways that a user could theoretically access the voting results, Seiler said in an interview with The Crimson last week. One requires the user to go through the administrative interface on the UC Web site, an access method that Seiler claimed remained only to him after Hysen and Flores’ access were removed on Nov. 15.