ELEVEN OUT of the 28 vacant positions in the Sanggunian’s Top 44 were filled as vote count reached quota during the 2014 Freshmen and Special Elections.
Included in the newly-filled seats are the Top 4, with Ryan Yu elected as vice president, Polo Martinez as secretary-general and Ray Gomez as finance officer.
The total number of votes for the said positions reached 4,656 out of the needed 4,477 quota.
Movement for Ignatian Initiative for Transformative Empowerment President Luigi Del Rosario said that there was a joint effort among the political parties in order to reach the quota.
“Everyone worked towards reaching quota.We left political agenda aside and we saw the greater goal in achieving a student council,” he said.
However, Christian Union for Socialist and Democratic Advancement Premier Abbo Hernandez said that the quota may have been reached only because of the freshmen.
“There were freshmen. They are more eager to vote, so that doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a political atmosphere within Ateneo,” he said in a mix of English and Filipino.
The Ateneo Commission on Elections (Comelec) released the results on August 14 at 11:06 PM.
However, the results are incomplete as the breakdown of votes for 4th year Bachelor of Science in Management, Major in Communications Technology Management (BS COMTECH) and 3rd year Bachelor of Science in Management (BS MGT) course representatives were not counted due to a system glitch.
Prior to the results, Comelec released a memorandum at 5:47 PM to announce the glitch that affected the aforementioned courses.
According to the memo, “should the course representative positions of 4 BS [COMTECH] and 3 BS MGT reach quota, the Commission shall seek the affected students to recast their votes for their course representatives only.”
Comelec assures that all “lost votes” will be tallied by August 18.
Glitch
On August 14, hard ballots were used to cast votes for the 4th year BS COMTECH and 3rd year BS MGT course representatives.
Olondriz explained that only the votes chosen on the first dropdown menus were counted. All other positions only had one dropdown menu due to the availability of one seat.
Some course representatives have several seats available, therefore a multiple dropdown list was utilized.
The same memo stated that the Comelec discovered the system glitch on August 13.
However, the Comelec chose to withhold the information “so as to let the natural flow of elections take place on the last day.”
“We didn’t want to affect the way people thought. Like last semester, they might think ‘I don’t want to vote since it’s not going to be counted,’” Olondriz said in a mix of English and Filipino.
During the 2014 Sanggunian General Elections held last school year, students petitioned for an extension, also due to a system glitch. Many votes were lost and the voter’s names were not recorded.
In an interview with The GUIDON, Comelec Chief Commissioner Denise Olondriz mentioned that on August 11, hard ballots were already used for the course representatives of 4th year BS COMTECH and for 4th year Bachelor of Arts in Diplomacy and International Relations with Specialization in East and Southeast Asian Studies (AB Dip IR).
Olondriz said Comelec had no intentions of hiding the said glitch. “It was known to the voters and only affected one day. We just didn’t include it [in the memorandum] because the [August 13] glitch was of graver matter,” she said in a mix of English and Filipino.
She said that during the mock elections that occurred on August 4 to 8, no such problem was encountered.
“There were other problems that were pointed out, such as some of the candidate’s names not appearing. These were fixed eventually,” she noted.
Olondriz reassured that the votes for the other positions were counted.
“We have a record for the rest of the votes [of the other positions]. We also have their ID numbers so we can call them back to vote for the course reps,” she said.
Olondriz said that they are thinking of re-evaluating the automation of the whole voting process.
“One alternative is for example in the National Elections, the casting of votes are manual but the consolidation is automated,” she said.
“We’re thinking, ‘which one is better?’ We really need to evaluate because it’s costly for it to be automated and we realize that it’s prone to errors,” she added.
With reports from Vince M. Estrada
Updated: August 16, 2014, 1:49 AM
