By Daniel Rothberg

Administrators investigated concerns that last year’s Senior Prefect election results were tainted due to the fact that the electronic ballot was briefly inaccessible to students during voting, Head of Upper School Harry Salamandra said. After exploring the issue, administrators reached the conclusion that the results of the election were valid.

“After speaking with all three of [the Prefect Council] advisers and getting a better understanding of what the potential issues were, we decided that there had been a fair election, although, indeed, there had been a snafu with the new [software] program,” Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts said.

Concerns were initially raised by Jules Bagneris, the father of Mariana ’11, a candidate in the election. Last May, in a letter to the administration, which Bagneris gave to The Chronicle, he said that his daughter had tried to vote after she came home from school but could not access the online ballot. Mariana notified Chaplain J. Young, one of the three election coordinators.

Young said that Mariana was unable to access the ballot because the England-based website used for the election, KwikSurveys, operates on a different time zone. As a result of the difference in time zones, voting was unintentionally programmed to end early.

“I had made an error with the stop and start time,” Young said.

Young said that he fixed the mistake and estimates roughly 10 minutes elapsed between the time voting stopped and started up again.