2008 Woodie Awards
Student Government Elections: Commission not present during vote tallying
Sharon Leff
News | 4/27/08
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A Towson University administrator downloaded the election results from CollegiateLink, the software company that worked with the University for Involved@TU.
"There was no election commissioner in my office when it was downloaded," Patrick Daniel, director of student activities, said.
Chris Castillo, a member of the election commission, said the commission did not have access to the Involved@TU site.
"The election commission did not see the results until about 30 seconds before the announcement," Castillo said.
"Once [Daniel] walked down in the [Chesapeake] Room with the paper, I got to see it 20 seconds before we read it," Thomas Tiefenworth, an election commissioner, said.
For the first time, Involved@TU was used for student voting. In previous years an outside provider called Votenet was used. Collegiate Link is used regularly by student affairs to track student involvement.
According to Article 1 Section 4 G of the policy, the election commission will oversee the Election Day voting, counting of the votes, and announcement of winning students.
In an e-mail to The Towerlight on Friday, Daniel said that "while the election policy makes reference to the 'counting of votes,' no one at the University (students or staff, including [coordinator for student organizations] Priscilla [Mint] and I) had access to the voting results. This was handled completely by Collegiate Link."
At 5:15 p.m. on Wednesday, Daniel and Mint met in his office to review the results of the election, downloaded from CollegiateLink in an Excel file, he said in the e-mail.
"From this file, I typed up the Word document with voting results so that the election commission could review and make the announcement," he said in the e-mail.
Team Tigertown swept the election on Wednesday, beating out the Foundation ticket and independent attorney general candidate Ryan Assadi.
"[The results] are a pretty important thing, it's the outcome of the entire election. I don't think they would necessarily do anything with the votes, but they could, and no one would know," Jenny Haley, outgoing SGA president, said.
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