Early morning server crash delays close of SA Election

    An early morning crash to the College of William and Mary’s e-mail servers delayed some students from casting ballots at the start of today’s Student Assembly election and Honor Council Referendum vote. The polls, which were slated to close at 8 p.m., will remain open until 10 p.m.

    The crash occurred around 4 a.m. Thursday morning, shortly after e-mails containing eBallot userID and password information for Thursday’s election were sent out to all undergraduate students, according to SA Elections Commissioner Ben Brown ’11.

    This is the first year the SA has used eBallot, an online voting service, for an election.

    Brown was alerted around 8:30 a.m. that some students had not received e-mails with voting information, and he placed a call to eBallot support and IT. All students had been sent and received the e-mail by 11:30 a.m.

    “Our William and Mary servers had a service outage apparently and blocked several of the emails — some people got them and could vote, others couldn’t,” Brown said via email. “Everything seems to be going according to plan now that we’ve resent all emails.”

    Despite some students receiving more than one e-mail containing voting information, Brown said that individual passwords remained the same and students will only be able to cast one ballot.

    The SA Elections Commission decided to extend voting hours to make up for the early delay.

    “We tend to see a majority of students vote during the first few hours of an election,” Brown said. “So the election should still progress without problems from hereon out.”

    The polls opened this morning at 8 a.m. and were scheduled to close at 8 p.m.

    The SIN network, which has been used for SA elections and referendum votes in recent years, is currently down until February.

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