Students experience voting bumps in Homecoming candidate race

Some students received error messages last week when trying to register their votes for King and Queen on the USF Homecoming website.

Nicole Hornstrom, director of the Homecoming Kickoff and Ball, said there should be no more problems with the voting website.

She said the program registers the IP address, a numeric address given to a computer on the Internet, so no two voters can use the same computer.

“We wanted to avoid sharing computers,” said Anthony Iannelli, executive director of the Homecoming Steering Committee. “We wanted to avoid one person campaigning and make it as individualized as possible.”

Iannelli said the committee didn’t have that notice on its website right away.

“It was a mistake on our part,” he said.

Technicians for the website said each computer in the Marshall Student Center and Library changed the IP address after a logout, which may have caused the error when students voted, Hornstrom said.

She said the committee has received many votes so the problems are not affecting everyone.

“If you don’t get an error message, then the vote has gone through,” Hornstrom said.

As the Homecoming team worked with technicians to fix the problem, a disclaimer on the website referred students who received an error message to call or e-mail their votes manually, she said.

Hornstrom said they will go through every vote to make sure there is only one U-number per voter.

Iannelli said that searching the U-numbers is not tedious thanks to the program in place.

“In the system, it shows every person’s vote and their U-number, so we’d be able to spot that right away,” he said. Iannelli said students who are having issues should contact him or Joey Monahan, the creator of the program.

“Any problems that people had they sent in an e-mail, and we fixed it for them so they were able to vote,” he said.

Iannelli said they e-mailed students back with an apology and cleared them to vote.

“We didn’t want to manually enter people’s votes; we wanted them to do it themselves,” he said.