After over a thousand people voted in the SGA presidential and vice presidential election, SGA was forced to restart the election due to an unknown amount of ineligible graduates and alumni that had access to the voting platform.

Senior Nick Bouffard, the Chair of the Elections Committee, sent out an email to UVM students at 8:02 p.m. March 26 explaining the reasoning behind restarting the election. 

“It came to our attention early this afternoon that recent UVM alumni and current UVM graduate students erroneously had the ability to vote using our election platform,”  Bouffard stated in the email. 

According to the email, the Elections Committee got word of the ability of alumni and graduate students to vote early this afternoon. 

As of 3:00 p.m, there were 1,275 votes in the system. 

“We currently have no way of knowing how many invalid votes there were,” Bouffard said. “Thanks to the complete anonymity of the voting platform, we have no way of purging the invalid votes from the tallies.” 

Students who have already voted must revote, as none of the current votes will be preserved. 

“Thank you so much for your flexibility and understanding,” Bouffard said. “We are thrilled to see so much enthusiasm in the voting process” 

The SGA presidential and vice presidential elections will restart at 8 a.m. Friday, March 27 and end at 4 p.m. Saturday, March 28. The voting link will be sent to students’ University emails.