By Kim Scroggins

Students who were the first to vote in the Student Government Association elections on Monday morning were subject to a voting glitch that shut the system down. Students had to e-cast their ballots again after the system failure.

The 70 students who voted around 10:30 a.m. were asked to resubmit their votes after the system was back up and running. Votes were re-taken again around 11:30 a.m. on Monday. SGA members say that the glitch could have been caused by a number of things.

“There was a mix up with the list registrar gave us,” SGA President Andrew Froning said. “When you’re dealing with thousands of students, some names are going to get fixed up, but we fixed that.”

The SGA has been using collegiatelink.net as their voting system for a little over a year and admits that there is still more to learn about the program.

“Obviously you’re going to have bumps and glitches when using something for the first time,” Froning stated. He said there was the possibility that the system didn’t recognize all the functions it needed to perform, such as requiring that commuters only vote for commuters.

Those who still were unable to vote after the system was brought back up could go to the Student Activities Office to get a paper ballot. However, Froning expects that there aren’t going to be too many of those.

Ultimately, the slight pause didn’t damage the election, but will allow for voting to remain open until noon on Wednesday and Froning, who was not discouraged by the malfunction, is hoping for high turnout.

“Last year was our first time using online and 1,018 people voted,” he said. “This year I’m hoping to get right around this number.”