This is a breakdown of everything we know, courtesy of Paul Bishop, vice president of information technology.

• Last Friday, Mar. 20, IT staff configured the voting application – this included checking all tables to be sure previous voting data was archived and cleared, entering the valid election dates into the table, and setting up the current ballot and candidates, and making sure the correct students have access (voters must be currently enrolled in the Spring semester).
• Staff tested the voting application successfully, verifying that the data was stored correctly, then cleared the tables once more and changed the election dates to apply to the current period.
• On Monday, Mar. 23, at 8:30, IT staff logged in to the voting site and noticed immediately that something was wrong: users could log in, but no candidate names were showing up. If the user submitted the ballot, it would log that they had voted (thus restricting them from trying again), but no voting data was saved.
• Staff called Amy Collins in the Office of Student Life to confirm that there was an issue, and we agreed that the best course of action would be to temporarily close the site until we could find the problem. Staff disabled the voting page, and posted a message stating that we had technical problems.
• After some troubleshooting, it was determined that the cause of the problem was an incorrect date in the voting database: after testing, the tester mistakenly entered the wrong end date for the voting period (May 23 instead of May 26).
• Once identified we fixed the date, then copied the list of people who had already submitted their ballot and cleared their records from the database so they would be able to vote again. After this, we re-enabled the voting application at approximately 10:00 a.m. Students began voting successfully at this point.
• IT staff emailed all of the students on the list of those who had voted unsuccessfully to let them know that we had had a technical issue, and that they should try again. We also emailed the list of affected students to Amy and Allison Canning and explained the situation.
• Amy requested a list of phone numbers for the affected students, which IT sent over. She was going to call them to follow up on our initial email.
• IT continued tracking the voting application several times a day for the remainder of the week, and tracked those students who had the initial problem to see if they were voting successfully. Of the initial 45 students whose first ballots didn’t submit successfully, 14 didn’t vote by the end of the voting period.
• Voting ended at 4 p.m. Thursday, Mar. 26. IT staff confirmed that the voting application was closed, then sent Amy the election results and a final copy of the spreadsheet tracking which students had successfully voted again.