Developers of an online voting system used by Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) have explained how a number of class representatives were erroneously elected last month.
Last week, TCDSU Electoral Commission Chair Sadhbh Brennan released a statement saying that a number of representatives were incorrectly elected to their positions as a result of a “technical difficulty” in the system, which was first trialled last year after two years of development
Matthew Henry, one of the developers, said tonight at the union’s first council meeting of the year that some names were “swapped around” during the automated count of the votes.
“The system misidentified some class reps”, Henry said.
“We found the issue whereby the order of candidates being picked out was shuffled.”
The online voting system was used by students from four different schools for class representative elections. Some 584 votes were cast online this year.
The software had been tested “hundreds and hundreds” of times, Henry said, but the issue “could only be found on a test of this scale”.
“Unfortunately, because there were shuffled votes”, he said, “when it came to counting the end result, the votes were allocated to the wrong person”.
“This only happened in very specific circumstances, in a very specific subset of elections”, he added.
Daniel O’Reilly, another developer of the system, said that “apart from what went wrong, some things did go right” with the system.
He said: “There were 584 votes cast online, which is quite amazing when you realise only four schools were doing online voting.”
“So although things did go horribly wrong for a certain small number of people – and we apologise to those people – we don’t look at this as an academic issue”, O’Reilly said.
He continued: “Our hearts do go out to the people who were affected and we’ve made ourselves available to them to explain what went wrong.”
“But, online voting, as much as a mishap as this was, we’ve found the problem, we fixed and we’re moving on.”
The online voting system was developed with a view to increasing voter turnout and encouraging greater student engagement with their representatives.
This year, a record 790 students were nominated for the position of class representative. The role, which TCDSU describes as “five mini-sabbatical officers rolled into one”, involves representatives attending and speaking on behalf of their class at council, as well as organising social events or keeping students informed on developments within the council.
