SGA to hold runoff elections one week after voting days

Photo of poll site at MMC taken by Zoe Chin/PantherNOW

By: Joshua Ceballos/News Director

 

Student government elections should be done by today, but once again final results at the Modesto Maidique Campus will be delayed for at least a week.

Elections for the Student Government Council at the Modesto Maidique Campus were held on Tuesday, April 2 and Wednesday, April 3. However, a special runoff election will be held the following week on Tuesday, April 9 and Wednesday, April 10 due to “complications with the ballot.”

SGC-MMC Elections Commissioner Labib Ahmed told Student Media that when students attempted to vote online for candidates for At Large, SIPA and Engineering senator spots, they could only choose one candidate even though there are several seats available. At Large has three seats, SIPA has three and Engineering has two, so it did not make sense for students to only be able to vote for one.

The elections commission sent an email to candidates running for these positions on the evening of Tuesday, April 2 addressing the technical issues and saying that students can vote a week later on PantherConnect and that final results will be posted on the SGA website.

Screenshot of email forwarded to Student Media by Jerome Scott, SGC-MMC advisor.

This isn’t the first time that runoff elections have been made due to ballot errors.

During the spring 2017 SGA elections, MMC had to hold a runoff election because the paper ballots did not include the names of every candidate who was running, according to Jose Toscano, director for Campus Life at the University.

“Also, back in 2009, we had another issue where we hired an outside company to count our electronic ballots and their system crashed, so we had to validate every paper ballot by hand and recount them,” said Toscano. “This comes down to administrative error. It was a mistake on our part and luckily we caught it the first day of elections.”

Some senators who were running for those seats are disappointed that they’ll have to campaign again a week later.

I’m really bummed out about it. I bought 300 flyers to ask people to vote for me and handed them out, but now they have the wrong date,” said current SGC-MMC Senator and At Large candidate Rose Ingraham. “But it would be a shame to not have a runoff considering the issue.”

Preliminary results for the elections will be announced on Friday, April 5 at 2 p.m. in GC 140 on MMC and in the Panther Square at the Biscayne Bay Campus. Final results at MMC will have to wait until after the runoff elections next week to include the three leftover positions, and 48 hours after any grievances have been filed.

Meanwhile at BBC, no issues have been reported, so final results should be announced on Monday, April 8 via email, according to Advisor for the Student Government Council at BBC Larissa Adames.

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