Many Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) class representatives were left without an agenda for today’s council until this afternoon, in a breach of the union’s constitution.
TCDSU’s constitution states that the union’s agenda should be compiled and sent to members of council “no later than 72 hours before the start of the meeting”.
But class representatives did not receive the agenda until 1.21pm today, while others appeared to have been left without the agenda altogether.
In an email statement to The University Times, Ellen McGrath, the secretary to the union’s council, apologised for the late circulation of the agenda.
“I apologise for the late circulation of the agenda, due to the fact that I have been working long hours this week”, she wrote. “I will strive to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
Some class representatives did not receive an agenda at all. McGrath said that from “the beginning of the year, we have some incorrect email details for our class representatives in our management system”.
“This happens every year, mainly due to the fact that collecting paper nominations leads to incorrect details sometimes being inputted into the system”, she wrote, adding: “Every opportunity we get to remind reps about this we take. We regularly mention at council that, if a rep is not receiving mail from us, it is probably due to an incorrect contact detail in the system. As soon as a rep contacts us we update their information ASAP.”
“We apologise again to any reps that may have not received the agenda for this week and we will, as always, strive to improve our communications with students.”
Earlier this year, TCDSU was forced to do a recount on some class representative elections after some students were wrongly elected due to a technical error with the union’s online voting system.
At a subsequent meeting of council, Matthew Henry, one of the developers, said that some names were “swapped around” during the automated count of the votes.
“We found the issue whereby the order of candidates being picked out was shuffled”, Henry said.
The software had been tested “hundreds and hundreds” of times, Henry added, but the issue “could only be found on a test of this scale”.
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.
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.
Correction: 19.43, January 28th, 2020
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the union was forced to re-run some class representative elections due to a technical error. In fact, the votes were recounted, rather than a re-run of the elections.
