Computer Glitch Delays Election

Students hoping to cast their vote in the Undergraduate Council presidential election yesterday were stymied by a small computer glitch in the telnet-based voter system—according to the computer error, students were almost 35 years too early.

Council technology coordinator Jared S. Morgenstern ’03 said the problem arose when the clock inside the computer responsible for servicing the election became misaligned.

“When I set up elections, I usually check the computer’s internal clock to make sure it’s consistent with time in the world. When I did that on [Sunday] night the clock read Feb. 11, 2036,” Morgenstern said.

Instead of rebooting the system and reconfiguring the clock, Morgenstern bumped up the computerized dates of the election itself.

“I changed the start and end times of the election so it coincided with the 2036 date,” he said.

This might have worked, but the clock reset itself again, to an earlier date in February 2036, thus locking students out of the election.

Morgenstern said he woke up yesterday to an inbox cluttered with messages from students unable to vote.

“I woke up and responded to [the e-mails] at around 12:30,” he said. “I don’t know when the problem started, but the first e-mails were sent around 11 a.m.”

Some students, however, claimed that they had trouble voting as early as 10 a.m.

Nevertheless, Morgenstern estimated that the telnet module was down from about 11 a.m. until he corrected the problem at 12:40 p.m.

Regardless of how long the system was down, Morgenstern said the integrity of the votes cast between 12:01 a.m. yesterday morning—the start of the election—and the time of the error is not in danger.

“That data is saved on the hard drive,” he said. “It’s a good thing that the problem is a system error and not with the files.”

According to Morgenstern, the computer has reset its clock four times recently, and has a long history of having problems at inopportune times. In fact, Morgenstern mentioned that the computer’s hard drive once melted during an election.

“This system is old,” he said. “Harvard is switching to a Web-based e-mail system soon, so hopefully this won’t happen again.”

Morgenstern said he is hopeful that another such problem will not arise during this year’s election.

“I’m not going to say it won’t happen, but now I know how to fix it as long as people notify me,” he said.

According to Morgenstern, only one person has the key to the room in the Holworthy Hall basement that houses the council voting computer, whose only function is to provide a database for elections such as this one.

As of yesterday afternoon, the compuer’s clock was set for Thursday, Feb. 7, 2036, and would accept electronic ballots through Feb. 9, 2036—corresponding to Dec. 12, 2001.

And while everything seems to be up and running now, the error proved worrisome to the candidates themselves.

“I’m a little bit frustrated that it was down, just because we had so many people so psyched up to go out and vote,” said presidential candidate Lauren E. Bonner ’04. “But I’m confident that it will be up and running and that everyone will be able to vote.”

Election Commission chair Kyle D. Hawkins ’02 said he did not expect yesterday’s delay to have a large impact on voter turnout.

“As far as I know, only a small percentage of voters are having difficulty voting,” Hawkins wrote in an e-mail. “The vast majority of voters are able to vote just fine.”

Voting ends at midnight tomorrow night.

Students having problems with the program can vote manually by e-mailing their votes to ucvote@hcs.harvard.edu.