Graduate student government election polls to reopen

Graduate student government elections will reopen for 10 hours on Wednesday to remedy technical problems that barred graduate students from voting during this month’s elections.

Graduate students who have not already done so will be able to vote on MyUCLA from 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday. The votes cast will be added to the current count, said Daniel Goodman, Graduate Student Association commissioner of elections.

At the GSA meeting last week, representatives voted to appeal the results to the GSA Elections Board because outages on MyUCLA’s server prevented students from voting online at intermittent times on April 11 of elections week, which ran from April 9-15.

The Election Board is composed of members from the 13 graduate student government academic councils and Goodman. Seven of eight members of the Election Board present at the meeting voted to reopen the elections.

While determining if they should reopen the elections, members of the Election Board voiced particular concern that the outages occurred during Grad Bar, an event held by the elections’ organizers to increase voter turnout. The smallest number of graduate students voted on April 11 relative to the other days of the elections.

Voter turnout fell just seven votes short of the 10 percent threshold needed for a referendum to pass when the elections closed April 15. As a result, a referendum to increase graduate student quarterly fees by $1.50 to support the Graduate Writing Center failed automatically, though the majority of voters supported the measure.

If the referendum passes this Wednesday, the Graduate Writing Center will receive about $30,000 in additional revenue next year.

Those funds could cut its currently anticipated deficit in half – from about $60,000 to $30,000, depending on the amount of additional funding the center obtains from sources outside of student fees.

A representative from the Anderson School of Management, Kate Edwards, cast the sole opposing vote.

Edwards, vice president of Anderson Student Association, said she did not support the decision because no graduate students filed formal complaints after the elections.

She added that she thought the elections’ data was inconclusive and reopening the vote makes the Election Board appear disorganized.

“The data we have is anecdotal and not based on anything statistically driven,” Edwards said.

But other members of the Election Board said they voted for the measure because the results of the elections were clearly in favor of passing the referendum, and the outcome of graduate student votes should not be altered by problems stemming from MyUCLA.

“The real issue is that we want to consider, besides the actual results, was it a fair election? Did everyone have the right to cast a ballot that wanted to vote?” said Mike Cohn, administrative advisor to GSA who attended the Election Board’s vote.

Nicole Robinson, GSA’s president-elect, said she thinks graduate students did not file formal complaints after the elections because the problem with voting was technical, and complaints normally pertain to violations of ethical codes of conduct during elections.

Robinson, who currently oversees the Graduate Writing Center Oversight Committee as the GSA vice president of academic affairs, said students may not have been aware that they could file complaints regarding the election process if they couldn’t access the ballots and voting information online.

Robinson said since voter turnout for graduate students has historically been low, she thinks graduate students who wanted to vote in the elections would have been discouraged from participating in the future if the GSA Election Board rejected the appeal to reopen voting.

The Election Board plans to meet again Friday to review the new elections outcomes before presenting the results at the next GSA forum on May 8.

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