We’ve uploaded and posted links to all of the reports arising from the AMS Electoral Fraud investigation on our Twitter feed but since not everyone is twitter-savvy just yet, here are the links to:
Final Report from Isabel Ferreras (Elections Administrator)
Report from Forensic Data Recovery (Independent Auditing Firm)
Revised Elections Results presented in a somewhat awkward format.
Final cost to the AMS: currently estimated at $42,000-43,000.
This is part one of a two-part editorial series on the recently revealed AMS Electoral Fraud.
While many of our readers have probably read the preliminary report issued by the Elections Committee, and were possibly even present at the last Council meeting, there hasn’t been a detailed technical explanation provided about exactly how the system was broken. Through brief discussions with members of the EC I believe I now understand how the attack occurred.
The crux of the matter is that student numbers were not validated during the final submission phase, which allowed for a trivial exploit of the system. Due to the simplicity of this hack, I remain deeply concerned about the validity of any of the election results, and I will be hesitant to accept their accuracy even following the final auditor’s report.
I would however like to emphasize that I’m not trying to tear down or belittle the work that this year’s EC did. This year’s elections were probably the smoothest and best-organized elections I have seen during my time at UBC, with this one exception. It is a new system, and mistakes do happen; albeit a rather titanic one in this case. That aside, I think the response following the discovery of the exploit has been handled very well, and I appreciate the levels of public disclosure.
More detailed and technical analysis after the jump.
With impeccable timing, the AMS chose the last Friday of the reading break to post a press release regarding allegations of voting irregularities in the last round of AMS elections. Due to the complete absence of details in the press release and the high potential for scandal, there has been quite a bit of speculation about what could possibly have gone on.
I’ll tell you now: I don’t actually know what’s going on, but at this point it seems fairly safe to say that electoral fraud has in fact occurred.
The people in the know are not talking. But there are some interesting tidbits that have emerged indicating that this Wednesday’s council meeting should be full of intrigue.
Here are the results from continuous VFM thusfar, and from the one-time VFM in interactive graph form!
The real winner at the end of the day, I would say, is the gossip rag AMS Confidential, who managed to create themselves partway through continuous VFM and eventually surpassed the Radical Beer Tribune in terms of total cash out.
It remains hard to get a firm grasp over the one-time VFM results, due to the limited information we now have. What we do know, is that on average, students allocated $1334 with their vouchers. This means a high degree of non-participation in one-time VFM, as this number should be at least $2000 if participation were 100%. If the history of one-time tells us anything though, it’s that results are hard to predict, and the characteristics you’d expect to be predictors aren’t that strong.
Analysis by Tim remains as true today as it did three years ago: there are different niches for the blogs to fill, but at the end of the day, the real benefit of one-time VFM is now the electorate can generally expect better-researched candidates.
We’ve been in talks with the Elections Committee to get more detailed results from the elections, as we beget further analysis. We’re hoping they get released to all soon, so we can try to get a better feeling on what exactly the results mean.
Ignore the false reports, the elections committee just announced we’re over 6500!
Huge kudos to the elections committee. It appears a combination of VFM and a new elections voting website has make for a sustained increase in turnout. See you all at the Gallery for results!
Note: Within an hour of this post, the elections committee broke the model! Good job, EC! (more t-tests, next time, I promise)
I did a really simple logarithmic fit to the data the elections committee has been releasing.
I’m going to go ahead and predict turnout this year will be 3781. Only 58% of last years ~6500.
Note: I’d do some confidence intervals, but seriously, I just finished a STAT 306 assignment, and I’m tired of t-tests.
What’s different this year from last? This editor notes one big difference is the lack of a student-wide email, highly visible poll-booths, and highly visible campaigns. Post your thoughts in the comments thread.
Haven’t voted yet? Why not?
It’s taken our monkeys a while, but they’ve finally counted the ballots and ranked the pairs. Who Council chose, as of Wednesday, January 20th.
Note: Proxies were counted as council members. This is simply a sample for entertainment purposes–I haven’t bothered with confidence intervals or any of that fun stuff. More results and details behind the jump!
Voting is now open. Cast your ballot now!
Insiders would like to offer a huge thanks to our partner, the Ubyssey, the moderator, Geoff Costeloe, the hosts, the UBC Centre for Student Involvement, and our supporters, AMS Elections. We saw an attendance of over 70 live in the house in this first-ever event.
Note: the video freezes in the first four seconds. If you wait for about 20 seconds thereafter, it resumes. Alternative, you can skip ahead a tiny fraction of seconds and it will play faster. Also, the video began late, and is missing an introduction by the hosts to the Centre for Student Involvement, as well as half of the presentation of the themes.
Before the debate begun, Natalie had managed to rack up a bunch of endorsements from media outlets. Yet Bijan has had the larger facebook group, the smoother campaign, and hadn’t been attacked for his perceived weaknesses on tuition\UBC relations. Would there be clash? Would one candidate stick out? The esteemed Alex Lougheed and I were trading thoughts as the debate went on, and here how I saw it, round-by-round.
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