After holding a special meeting Tuesday, the faculty senate decided to accept last week’s faculty election results despite complications with the electronic election process.

Voting originally took place 8 a.m. Wednesday through 5 p.m. Thursday. That time was extended to 5 p.m. Friday to ensure everyone had a chance to vote after some encountered problems loading the voting module.

Internet Technology Services was able to use the same portal software used in last year’s election during the extended voting time to allow faculty who encountered problems a chance to vote.

“It was substantially less than last year, but it was still slightly higher than in the year we used paper elections,” said Jeff Ashley, vice chair of faculty senate and head of the faculty elections committee. Paper elections were used two years ago before the electronic elections were introduced last year. Nearly 200 people voted this year, about 100 less than last year.

“Without the glitches, we probably would have been closer to last year’s numbers,” Ashley said.

Despite the problems, the faculty senate decided to continue using electronic elections.

“We have to show some confidence that it will be corrected,” for future elections, said Assege HaileMariam, chair of faculty senate. “We need to give it a chance.”

Ashley agreed that considering the convenience of electronic voting and the increased number of votes last year, elections should continue to be done electronically.

The senate agreed to accept the votes received in the elections despite the complications because the faculty were given additional time to place their votes.

“In general we were just concerned that steps had been taken that the vote could be certified, that people weren’t disenfranchised and that the votes would be fair,” Ashley said.

The senate passed a motion stating, “While acknowledging and regretting unforeseen problems in the conduct of the recent faculty elections, the faculty senate believes that reasonable accommodations, made in timely fashion, were sufficient to ensure a fair and legitimate voting process.”

Chat Chatterji, assistant vice president for ITS said the problem with the software occurred because the voting module encountered problems when some users tried to use it in the Internet Explorer 6 browser.

Updates to both the browser and to the Oracle portal software that was used caused a reaction that would not allow voters to use their voting ballots.

“EIU/IT does not develop or invent any of this stuff,” Chatterji said. “It comes from external suppliers, some very well known, for example Oracle and Microsoft, in this case. Therefore, I cannot guarantee 100 percent reliability for everything we support and I do not know of anyone in my business who does.”

Ashley said he is concerned that management issues and a rearrangement of positions at ITS might have caused some problems with the elections.

“We didn’t quite understand why a management decision was made to reorganize ITS in such a way that certain people with experience in certain areas were placed outside of their expertise,” Ashley said. “If they had somebody that worked on it last year and we had a system that they designed and we knew worked, wouldn’t it be easier for everybody to use the same person and the same system?”

The faculty senate executive committee met with President Lou Hencken, Blair Lord, provost and vice president for academic affairs, and Jeff Cooley, vice president of business affairs on Monday to discuss what happened with elections.

They determined that business affairs, the office which controls ITS, should begin an internal and external evaluation process of management and internal activities.

“We approached this (meeting) in the spirit of problem solving,” HaileMariam said.

Just as other entities on campus go through evaluation processes such as student evaluations and academic accreditations, they determined that the office of business affairs should also undergo an internal evaluation.

“Cooley agreed that if other areas within campus are being evaluated, maybe it’s a healthy thing to have somebody from the outside look at business affairs,” Ashley said. HaileMariam said she was impressed with Cooley’s openness during their meeting.

“He was very open in identifying the problems and rectifying them,” she said.

The senate expects to announce the results of the election next Tuesday.