Most students thought the Student Government Association election was over Feb. 26.
The slates said it is not.
"I thought all of this would be over last Tuesday," said former presidential candidate Jeff Malloy.
The voting Web site was inaccessible from the evening of Feb. 25 to the morning of Feb. 26, and Malloy and slate adviser Joshua Lawrie met with the elections board to question this and other issues about the election.
At this time, no one has documented how long the Web site was down. Members and supporters of both slates said it affected voter turnout. Malloy said he knows of at least 150 people who couldn't vote.
According to President Tommy Rector, this is the first year the SGA election has been completely Web-based.
Jeff George programmed the Web site. George, a distributed systems programmer analyst, said he was not made aware of the problems.
"The system was not designed to stop," George said. "It could have been slowed or stopped by too much activity."
George and the elections board said online housing signup may have caused the shutdown.
The problem, according to Elections Board Chairman Joshua Wilson and Director of Student Life Kay Bales, was not reported by either slate at the time the site was inaccessible.
According to Bales, election results are not likely to change.
"Using the system we're using, I'm not sure on what basis someone would contest the results," she said.
Timing plays a role in this question, Bales said.
"If either slate had lodged a complaint at the time, we would have looked into that," she said. "We could have accessed an emergency number to get that fixed immediately, but it was not brought to our attention."
Malloy and Amanda Goveart, SGA Director of Academic Affairs and Team Tolu events coordinator, said each slate was focused on winning and decided to leave all questions until after election was over.
The elections code is in the process of being amended, and questions still remain about how to execute the current code.
"The election board did a good job with what they had," Goveart said. "It's like they had to try to put a puzzle together without having all the pieces."
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