By: Charlotte Lewis
Continuous mistakes made in course rep elections over the last few weeks have left students across the University experiencing severe confusion regarding their nominations.
Nominations opened for course reps across all departments on Friday October 15 and closed a week later on the 22nd. Students were actively encouraged to nominate themselves or to vote for others by campaigns put forward by YUSU and individual departments.
The problems began with students faced with the daunting task of having to limit their pitches to 255 characters as opposed to the intended 255 words.
Vision understands that the problem was noticed during the nominations process and subsequently corrected, and that it was a genuine mistake.
There was further inconvenience when nominees had to reapply due to supposed technical problems, which meant students were put forward into the wrong year groups. The History department claimed that communication errors and “a fault with the YUSU website” were primarily to blame for the inaccuracies. However, YUSU have maintained that the problems could be due to departments inputting incorrect data. Where responsibility lies is unclear.
A further problem arose for second year History students when a candidate was believed to have been entered twice. The problem was first noticed by YUSU on October 29, when elections had already opened.
To correct the issue the election was cancelled in favour of a by-election, meaning that all votes cast before the 29th were not counted. For many students this caused a problem with campaigning and proved to be incredibly inconvenient. The by-election ran from noon of Friday 29th to noon of Tuesday November 2. The time period for voting was noticeably reduced.
Vision spoke to Academic Affairs Officer Ben Humphrys, who implied that elections did not run as smoothly as YUSU had planned, though he noted that “more than double the number of students [ran] this year” and that most serious issues from last year had been “ironed out”.
Communication errors between departments and YUSU were increased by the inability of departments to edit or amend any information on the YUSU website. The constant email updates from departments suggest a lack of knowledge on their part.
The errors made during this process have been acknowledged by both YUSU and departments but how the mistakes have been made is unclear. Vision have learned that YUSU plan on improving the website and the course representative nominations for next year.
Humphrys noted that “we can do better, and we’ll be fully reviewing the elections and putting in more staff support to ensure that we sort out anything remaining for the next time round.”