SA revamps election timeline, voting

By Amber Tong     1/28/15 3:06pm

The 2015 General Elections have officially begun and according to Director of Elections Austin Cao, they will be conducted through an improved version of Owlection, a program that contributed to the partial invalidation of last year’s elections.

Positions to be contested are the Student Association Executive Board and Blanket Tax organization leadership, including Rice Student Volunteer Program, Honor Council, University Court, Rice Program Council, Campanile, Thresher, KTRU, RTV and Sammy the Owl.

In the first-round elections of 2014, two candidates, Lovett College junior Min Ji Kim and McMurtry College senior Trent Navran ran for the SA presidency. Navran gained the most votes in the election, but it was found that a loophole in the Owlection system permitted alumni to vote. 

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“Last year in the first round of elections, we allowed all Rice students who had a NetID to vote in the general elections,” Cao, a Hanszen College freshman, said. “We discovered last year that there were alumni who voted, so we had to redo the elections.”

Two SA senators filed a petition to contest the results, citing this issue as one of their four claims. University Court acknowledged the validity of two of the four filed complaints and partially invalidated the outcome of the presidential election. Consequently, a re-run of the entire elections was held via Qualtrics as opposed to Owlection. Ravi Sheth, the current SA President, ran as a write-in candidate in this second round and won; Ravi then appointed Navran as the SA executive vice president. In addition, three candidates began running for the position of SA internal vice president in the second round, when none had run in the first round; Hanszen College sophomore Sai Chilakapati won the position. The election re-run also saw a greater turnout than in the first time it was held, although several candidates were afraid a 20 percent quorum would not be reached. In light of the invalidation of first-round elections results last year, Cao said this loophole has been corrected.

According to Cao, the Election Committee will again utilize Owlection, a webapp developed by Rice Apps, in the voting process. Cao said Owlection now has built-in functionalities that will restrict the pool of eligible voters to the currently enrollwed undergraduate population.

“Our solution now is to get a list of all the current undergraduates from the Registrar first,” Cao said. “We’re now able to limit voting to that specified list of Rice undergraduates.”

According to Cao, this year marks the beginning of a move toward the full adoption of Owlections, which shows support of Rice student initiatives.

“In terms of the voting system itself, we don’t want to rely on third-party software anymore,” Cao said. “We want to continue using Owlections, which was created by Rice students, and continue to support them and help them make it more stable.”

In addition, Cao said a webapp is currently under development so that, in the near future, candidates may turn in electronic rather than paper copies of their petitions. According to Cao, online submission could potentially become available in time for the second-round elections.

“Our Director of Technology, Xilin Liu, has been developing a webapp for submitting petitions,” Cao said. “That way we can guarantee that people are getting the right number of signatures, that there aren’t repeats and that petitions don’t get lost in the process of turning them in.”

Along with its decision to invalidate first-round election results, in a letter written last year, UCourt also emphasized the importance of publicizing meetings held by the Election Committee. Two of the petition statements that were not validated by UCourt were concerned with Cao said the Election Committee will remain transparent throughout the process.

“All of our meetings are open to the public,” Cao said. “We’ll announce it on the SA website. [If anyone] wants to come join … they can definitely stop by.” 

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