Early voting for student government elections delayed multiple times

UPDATE: North posted an update to Heel Life on Tuesday that the BOE decided to conduct the election through the UNC qualtrics platform due to the technical difficulties. According to the update, a ballot link should be emailed to students on Tuesday at 5 p.m.

Early voting for the UNC student government elections was delayed following a complaint by all three student body presidential candidates to the UNC Board of Elections. Early voting was moved online, but remains delayed by technical difficulties.

A priority mail box, which was converted into a ballot box, and a stack of ballots were initially placed outside of the Student Government suite in the Frank Porter Graham Student Union on Friday at 5 p.m. for in-person early voting.

The candidates for student body president — Adolfo Alvarez, Kailey Wadsworth and Jakob Williams — along with Alvarez’s co-campaign manager, Violet Frost, filed a joint complaint to the BOE stating the box was “inappropriate for the integrity of the ongoing election.”

They wrote that the box was unwatched and unchecked, and that there were no measures to guarantee students don't vote twice since PIDs would not be crosschecked with online voting.

The complaint asked the BOE to invalidate the physical ballots and reopen early voting through Heel Life on Sunday at 12 p.m. In a separate statement, Alvarez confirmed with The Daily Tar Heel that the votes were nullified due to a lack of verification process.

“The Board was appraised of serious potential vulnerabilities in its original plan for early voting, and thus suspended that course of action to ensure election security,” Acting Chair of the BOE Elias Larson North wrote in a statement to The DTH.

North wrote that a Heel Life error discovered during digital ballot preparation made it impossible to begin online early voting on Sunday. The BOE is now waiting for technical assistance from Campuslabs and hopes to conduct the election as scheduled on Tuesday.

“However, given the timings of these issues, it is unlikely that early voting will be conducted as originally scheduled,” North wrote.

Alvarez said not having early voting will be complicated for voter turnout, which was around 7 percent of the student body with the full early voting period last year. 

“Something that I was expecting we could do as a joint effort between campaigns is to increase that turnout and get the word out about the election, which will be a little hard with the Board of Elections,” he said. “But I trust that they will find a solution and get Heel Life back up on time to at least have some time to work on this early voting process.”

Alvarez said there could be more preparation from the BOE for the voting process.

“You know, we’ve put a lot of work into the campaigns, and we want to see our supporters being able to cast their votes, just because it’s really hard to get people to vote,” Alvarez said.

In a follow-up email to The DTH, Alvarez wrote that all campaigns are very thankful for North’s help, and they understand the technical issues are beyond the BOE’s control.

The 24-hour Election Day voting period is still scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 11 at 5 p.m. through Wednesday, Feb. 12 at 5 p.m.

This is a developing story. Check back here for updates. This story was last updated at 3:45 p.m. on Tuesday Feb. 11.

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