Fraud reports plague student election

PORTALES — Welcome to student government, complete with student voter fraud concerns.

Eastern New Mexico University addressed an election controversy last month, holding a re-vote in its student body presidential race after officials discovered in its online voting tool an apparent vulnerability that may have been exploited.

The victor was the same in each version of the election, but college officials and the constituents of its student government can have more confidence in the process going forward.

The discrepancies were first identified by the executive secretary of the university’s Office of Planning and Analysis.

“I pulled the information down to send to the advisor and the director of elections, and I glanced at the IP addresses and noticed a bunch of the same IP addresses within a minute of each other,” Cristine Watson told The News of her initial look at the April 2-6 online election results.

What that might have amounted to was a person voting repeatedly, according to the vice-president of student affairs.

“From my understanding it was the ability of one person — and maybe more than one, we don’t know the exact number — to vote more than once,” Jeff Long said on Monday. “And so once that was discovered, obviously we looked into it.”

The origin of the suspect IP addresses has still not been isolated, Long said, but the fact that some votes could have been compromised meant the same was possible for many more.

“I would guess that since one person or two people figured out how to do it, that multiple people could have,” he said, noting it was the first such issue he knew of in almost four years with ENMU. “We definitely will tighten the process up on our end ahead of time.”

The process was tightened up in time for the re-vote, held later last month. All told, Kaitlyn Bigham defeated her opponent Joseph Gergel in both iterations — even with the suspicious votes excluded from the initial tally.

“The survey platform we use is called SurveyMonkey,” Watson said. “The second election, when they requested that it be redone, that one got locked down. Basically, it went to email addresses and they could only sign in through their email.”

The advisor to ENMU’s Associated Students group summarized some of the events last week in a letter addressing “recent circumstances.”

“No formal appeals were filed related to the first or second election. Both presidential candidates accepted the results of the second election (re-vote) and the results were made final,” Bradley Mauldin said in the letter posted on the ASENMU portal of the university website. “...we acknowledge that we could have done a better job facilitating the initial election, we gave notice to the Student Body when we identified discrepancies in the results and we facilitated a re-vote.”