Election Voting Portal Had Glitches, AUEC Covered Up.

Some members of the student body have information which can seriously damage the Election Commission’s credibility this election cycle: It appears a handful members of the Class of 2018 (who are not in the ASP) were also sent QR codes to vote this year, in spite of the fact that they have not been a part of the student body for over six months. However, the total number of ex-students who received an email enabling them to vote this year is, as of now, unknown.

Sahil Bhargava (ASP ’19) and Raghav Katyal (UG ’19) told The Edict that they know of past students who cast their vote this time, and that the AUEC was informed of this on the election day. The two of them contacted the AUEC and received a personal reply regarding the query. The AUEC claims that they “scrubbed” these votes off the system but that leaves a lot of questions to be asked. Is this even possible, since, the Ashoka Election System guarantees the secret ballot provision to every voter? When did they scrub it, after some students had already anonymously voted? Why have they kept mum about this?

If the AUEC’s claims of scrubbing these votes is true, then they could only have done it for those past students they knew voted illegitimately, this will not hold in the case of past students who voted but whose names they do not know. Therefore, it cannot be known with certainty that the AUEC cleaned all the votes cast on election day of illegitimate votes. Moreover, even the conception of their ability to erase votes raises concerns about the amount of power they wield.

Another undesirable scenario is what if the AUEC does not have the ability to “clean” votes, then the votes of ex-students could have influenced Thursday’s elections. The most important question that remains to be asked is whether this can be grounds for a call to holding the elections again? There has been no official statement on this issue from the Election Commission, which chose to withhold this information from the student body.

Update: Newer information emerges, which informs the Edict that some members of the contesting parties had been informed of this glitch by the AUEC. It is not clear whether all parties were informed of this, or just some.