AMS Elections Chief Electoral Officer Isabelle Ava-Pointon is urging students who have already cast their vote this week to vote again after ballot changes.
The AMS elections team released a third version of this year’s electronic ballot following another change early Monday morning due to minor errors in the original wording.
Voting began at midnight March 1, but at around 12:30 a.m. Ava-Pointon said VP administration candidate Lauren Benson notified her that there was an error in the ballot.
Under the section for VP administration, the question written said, “Are you in favour of Lauren Benson being elected to the position of Vice President Finance?”
Ava-Pointon had finalized the ballot on Saturday night. She said she looked over it many times and had others look it over as well.
Ava-Pointon said she had to reformat the question when former VP administration candidate Lawrence Liu dropped out of the race — leaving Benson unopposed.
“I copy-pasted it from the vice-president finance [section] just for the formatting, and I changed the name but I forgot to change the actual position,” she said.
Ava-Pointon expressed regret about the error and posted a new ballot in order to prevent any confusion.
“I am sincerely sorry. I take full responsibility for this … I had checked [the ballot] many, many times, but it’s just an honest mistake,” she said.
Ava-Pointon was then made aware at around 10 a.m. on Monday morning that there was an additional error in the ballot. Georgia Yee’s paragraph description for her Board of Governors candidacy contained the paragraph Yee had sent in for her Senate candidacy. Ava-Pointon again made a new ballot to avoid confusion.
Forty-five people voted on the first ballot and 174 on the second. Ava-Pointon said there could be overlap in those numbers.
Ava-Pointon will be contacting students who have already voted to inform them they’ll need to vote again.
“We need to have things as clear as possible for people,” she said.
As a result, the voting period has been extended by three hours and will now close on Friday at 8 p.m.
Voting is open online from March 1 until March 5. This article is part of our 2021 AMS elections coverage.