Why We're Paying $15,000 Dollars to Have Our Vote Count; also, Why We Hate the USG and Love Yaro

We're done with USG elections.You'd have thought that a year of gross incompetence (with a near-revote of the fall VP election that landed us on IvyGate), a false start to the spring voting, and complete misreporting of the approval polls would have conditioned us to be cautious. You'd think we open all CDY emails with a certain down-trodden stoicism and indifference to the latest form of USG election failure. And we really thought we didn't care anymore until we got the most recent email, detailing one of the worst voting errors in USG history and a complete breakdown of the electronic system we've been relying on for the past seven years. Oh, and the USG is now estimating this will cost about $15,000 to fix.After the jump, the story of the vote that finally broke our spirit, and the victim whose calm demeanor, technical prowess, great name, and unflinching assessment of the Undergraduate Student Government may offer us all hope of eventual redemption: YARO.Here's what happened:According to CDY, after the complete and utter clusterf*ck that was the past year of elections, the USG decided to go back and audit all elections since 2002, when the USG switched from paper ballots to its current electronic voting system. This audit uncovered "some troubling errors" in the fall's 2012 Class Senator election (and the understatement of the year award goes to... Connor Diemand-Yauman!)The USG's voting code, it turns out, completely ignored votes for Michael "Yaro" Yaroshefsky and Andreas Sakellaris. We thought the computer just didn't want to deal with hard to spell names, until we found out it had successfully tabulated votes cast for Waqas Jafri.The hand-calculated votes were shocking: Yaro destroyed the competition.His 195 votes were more than double the votes of the next closest candidate, current 2012 Senator Julie Chang (USG structural reminder: two senators per class,) who only had 95. Yaro was by far the most aggressive campaigner during the election season, first running for 2012 President and then for Senator. He even had a website! A real, functional, campaign website (the sadly now defunct yaro2012.com), complete with videos shot around Princeton's campus! Obviously he just seemed to want it more than his competitors.And yes, usually single-minded devotion to running for the USG inspires ridicule, not commendation. But even after two election failures, Yaro found a way to participate in the USG, serving as IT Chair, a fairly thankless, wonkish position that, unlike most USG roles, actually involves real work. Like, for instance, working with the Office of Information Technology to perform an audit of the elections from the past seven years.That's right - the cruel irony of the situation is that Yaro probably had a front row seat to the discovery of the mechanical failure of democracy. He had to report to the USG that they had bungled his election, and would now have to spend $15,000 dollars to repair the malfunctioning system.Awkward.To its credit, the USG did offer Yaro the choice between IT Chair and 2012 Senator once it realized the error. But Yaro chose to stay on as IT Chair, leading to an awkward dethroning of the number three vote-getter and current Senator Becca Lee. CDY and 2012 President Lindy Li, perhaps wary of another election, will now appoint the next Senator after a round of interviews (email Jack Altman at jaltman@princeton.edu if you want an interview for the position.)What hope can we glean from this sad story of mechanical incompetence and unfairness? We leave you with the election reform blog, written by none other than USG IT Chair Michael Yaroshefsky. On the blog, Yaro doesn't appear in the least bitter about his defeat - his posts suggest a clear-eyed technocratic thinker who understands the USG is facing a crisis and needs to fix it. Here's an excerpt from his May 10 post, a summary of his report to the Senate:I stressed the fact that USG elections are one of the two primary times during which almost everyone interacts with the USG (the other is lawn parties). Every single election this year has been plagued by problems, many of which could have been prevented had there been some better elections management system in place. This includes both the technical system and a detailed protocol.This was the first time I announced my intention to develop alongside the software an internal protocol. From what I've seen while helping out during this past election, there needs to be a more clear understanding of who is responsible for certain parts of the election process. It would be much more efficient if everyone could refer to a simple document that outlines everyone's responsibilities during the election cycle.Acknowledgement of a problem and a call for both technical solutions and increased responsibility? Maybe Yaro wasn't meant to be a politician, after all. But he's won his way into our hearts, where we don't use computers to count the ballots.