SGA admits it did not give UNIT enough time to prepare for the online voting process, causing Monday’s delay

Updated Tuesday, April 8A failure of the elections commission led to a 24-hour delay in the Student Government Association online voting process, Tom Mogan, director of Student Development and adviser to SGA, said today.The commission failed to give the Office for University Information Technologies enough time to create and launch the online voting system, a failure for which Mogan assumed responsibility.”The elections commission did not give UNIT enough time to get the process set up,” Mogan said. “We thought it would just be a question of putting new faces with new names on the ballot, but it is more involved.”UNIT was able to get the new information onto the site by Monday but could not make it accessible to students without resetting the server. Doing so Monday morning would have caused problems for the campus network, so it was instead done this morning.”It’s ultimately my fault as adviser to SGA,” Mogan said. “This one was not UNIT’s fault.”Mogan denied rumors that the delay was caused by allegations of campaign misconduct by candidates.”We do have some allegations of poster ripping … but you have that every year,” Mogan said.”There’s been nothing out of the ordinary to raise any concern.”Only one presidential ticket has been sanctioned for violating elections regulations. Nick Bouknight and Safeer Bhatti inadvertently broke the elections laws when information about their campaign was e-mailed to the sisters of Chi Omega as part of the minutes for a cancelled meeting the two were supposed to attend.Sending campaign information via e-mail violates article II, section 4, sub-section F of SGA election laws, which prohibits all electronic and vocal distribution.