Election results called into question
Seven BOA seats yet to be decided as SFUO investigates voting problems
MANY CANDIDATES FOR the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) Board of Administration (BOA) were left confused and without answers following the announcement of the SFUO election results Feb. 11.
Winners for seven of the 23 BOA seats—those in the social sciences and engineering faculties— have yet to be announced due to problems not yet disclosed to the candidates or the public.
“I’m frustrated about it because we haven’t been given a clear timeline for when we’re going to find out [the results],” said current social sciences BOA director Peter Flynn, who ran for a second term. “All that we’ve been told is that they’re conducting an investigation.”
At midnight on Feb. 11, before all the election results were revealed, outgoing SFUO President and elections committee member Seamus Wolfe and SFUO elections Chief Returning Officer Elizabeth Doneathy explained that they would not be revealing the new social sciences and engineering BOA directors.
“Due to irregularities that have no effect on the outcomes of the executive races, referendums, Senate elections, or BOA [races] to the other faculties ... results will be announced for each of the races except for the BOA races of social sciences and engineering,” Wolfe announced on election night.
Social sciences and engineering positions were the only contested BOA seats in the election. In social sciences, 13 candidates ran for six seats, and in engineering, two candidates competed for one position.
“It’s frustrating because you don’t know; you’re in a limbo state,” said Flynn. “You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, you don’t know if you’ve been elected or not, you don’t know what kind of irregularities there are.”
Without delving into an explanation of the investigation, Wolfe explained that the irregularities were present within the ballots themselves.
“In the afternoon, on the last day of voting, there were a few flags raised about a couple of the ballots,” said Wolfe. “We got the company [who manages the online voting] to do a security check, and it came up with a small amount of ballot—that didn’t affect any of the other races—[that] were irregular. For that reason, we had to start an investigation and figure out what the problem was.”
An email sent from the elections committee to the BOA and obtained by the Fulcrum explained that the final results of the social science and engineering could be significantly affected.
“It appears that the number of irregularly cast ballots may have been significant enough to have an impact on the outcome of the social sciences and engineering BOA races,” the email stated.
Wolfe plans to reveal the results of the investigation to the BOA in a report at the next meeting Feb. 28. Until then, further details of the investigation will not be revealed.
What is disgusting about this whole process is that, just like the previous BOA meeting that was held at Café Alt, the February 28th BOA meeting will (most likely) be held in-camera and the student population will kept in the dark on what exactly these reports contain. That, my friends, is transparency at it's worst possible state. Some of these same individuals that are "hiding" this information from the students, have in the past been VERY CRITICAL of the University of Ottawa's administration for lacking transparency. It's funny how anyone can take these individuals seriously anymore. Their hypocritical nature is disgusting and is a disgrace to student politics. It's sad when you think that students aren't even aloud to hold their own student representatives to account anymore because of all the corruption, hypocrisy and secrecy that continues to plague their institutions.