Some students who logged on to Student Central on Wednesday to vote for Mr. and Ms. UNC in the Homecoming elections were disappointed when a minor glitch shut them out of the system.
But student officials said the foul-up is not indicative of a larger problem.
Student election officials reported a temporary software glitch in the new online voting system that was used Wednesday and will be used for the general elections of student body officers in February. "It was only down for about 15 minutes," said Elections Board Chairman Jeremy Tuchmayer.
He said the problem was a misunderstanding of how a certain part of the software worked. "It wasn't a problem with the voting program or anything technically wrong with (Academic Information Services)," Tuchmayer said.
Student Body Secretary Michael Woods said he was impressed with the quick response to the glitch.
"As soon as it was reported by a student, Jeremy Berkeley-Tuchmayer called (the company that provides the software), who called AIS and then (AIS) took care of it," Woods said.
The problem occurred because the program has 100 megabytes of memory, but the system was only using 1 percent of that storage capacity. An AIS technician inadvertently set the memory capacity at the wrong setting. Despite the problem, Woods said he felt the new voting system was still successful because of the increased voter turnout.
Tuchmayer said the total number of people that voted exceeded last year's total of 400 by far, with 1,865 students logging on to vote.
