A text message sent from one of the campaigns hours before voting closed in the ASUO election Friday raised brief, and apparently false, concerns over the security of the ballot in the election.
Since voting in ASUO elections was moved online, it has been customary for the administrators running the ballot on DuckWeb to avoid releasing any information about the ballot other than the raw number of votes cast. Those numbers don’t come out until voting closes.
However, text messages sent from the Campus Change Coalition campaign Friday afternoon suggested there might be some breach in the security. “We’re 100 votes behind!” read one message. “Can you get 5 votes for (presidential candidate) Amelie (Rousseau) & (running mate) Maneesh (Arora) & Campus Change Coalition before voting ends on DuckWeb at 5pm?”
“There’s no way for them to get that information,” said Tim Ketchum, an administrator for DuckWeb who runs the system for the election.
Ketchum said he was the only one with access to the results until they were released, and, as of when the message was sent out, even he did not know the totals for the candidates.
The results of the election itself also supported Ketchum’s claim. In no campus-wide race was the margin of victory 100 votes or fewer.
However, it did prompt the Oregon Commentator’s blog to suggest Rousseau and Arora may have been guilty of “a serious violation of campaign rules.”
Those within the Campus Change Coalition campaign said they had simply arrived at the number by comparing the number of votes they estimated they had garnered to the total number cast on DuckWeb, as reported by Ketchum.
As a tactic, purporting to know the vote count appears to be older than the Campus Change Coalition.
“We used to tell candidates that we worked with that they were losing and we had it from a good source,” said one commenter on the Commentator’s Web site. “Of course we didn’t, but it served as motivation.”
However, ASUO Outreach Coordinator Andrew Crampton, who campaigned for the rival Reality Check slate, called it “maliciously lying to students” in another reply to the
Commentator’s post.
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