Anonymous mudslinging. Flawed voting procedures. Allegations of fraud.
No one said holding an election at the Johns Hopkins University was easy.
Last week, for the fourth time in a year, the school tried to elect a student body president - and failed. The election was called off after enterprising students managed to break into the computer system and vote more than once.
This is looking a lot like last year's election headache that saw three attempts to name a president in the spring thwarted. Because of an assortment of problems that marred the elections, from crashing computers to character assassination to a tie, a new president wasn't seated until last fall, almost six months late.
School officials and students vowed to fix the problems, but once again, last week's contest for a new president was canceled.
The problem this time? The students, who vote online, logged in using their birthdays as passwords. It looks as if some of them decided to vote more than once and easily cracked into the system.
A whopping 30 percent of the ballots cast could be fraudulent, according to student election monitors, although Hopkins administrators say the number is much lower.
After all, surfing the Internet for personal information - such as birth dates - or mathematically deducing an eight-digit combination - day, month, year - is a piece of cake for many Hopkins students, whose average SAT score is nearly 1,300.
"Birthdays are too simple; a student could write a program for that easily," said Avi Rubin, a Hopkins professor who specializes in voting issues.
Rubin, who was a presidential election monitor and is currently advising state lawmakers about voter fraud, is surprised that Hopkins has been dogged by election problems, especially at a university that has produced such politicians as President Woodrow Wilson and New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
"It's not earth-shattering with multibillion-dollar budgets at stake, but you'd think that they would have found a better solution by now," Rubin said.
Few elections are free of controversy, but Hopkins contests hit what was probably their low point last spring. The trouble started when several students withdrew from the presidential race, citing vicious personal attacks, many of which appeared on the Internet anonymously.
"It has do somewhat with the competitiveness of Hopkins students and the prestige of being president," said Jeffrey Groden-Thomas, the university's director of student involvement.
This first attempt to elect the student body president was thrown out because of violations of campaigning rules. The university tried again a few weeks later, but the race resulted in a tie between the two contenders. The runoff was canceled after a computer system used to monitor the results crashed.
Frustrated students and Hopkins officials decided to postpone the election until last fall, when current student body President Iverson Long won, beating a candidate who ran in all four attempts.
Long, who was studying in Moscow last year, missed the three races in the spring but decided to run when he returned to campus for the fall semester. The loser hasn't talked to him since, he said.
The university has been using computer or Internet voting for over five years and, to create a secure voting system, students have always been required to use a password to be able to vote. But school officials were reluctant to use some obvious codes such as student identification or Social Security numbers because of privacy concerns.
In the fall, some students' personal information, including parts of Social Security and student identification numbers, was pulled out of school files and posted on the Internet briefly.
The student Board of Elections and Hopkins officials decided to use birthdays as passwords for this election. But shortly before elections began, officials realized that student birthdays were readily accessible over the Internet. They decided to proceed anyway.
"It was a good faith attempt," Groden-Thomas said. "It didn't work."
Shortly after voting began March 3, monitors noticed that some computer terminals were being used to vote numerous times, suggesting that some students were voting more than once. Some suspect the temptation to cheat was greater because, along with voting for student body president, students were also electing a young trustee, who would sit on Hopkins' governing board for four years.
More than 20 students were running for the position, compared with only two for president.
"Young trustee is something that looks really good on the C.V. [curriculum vitae, or resume]," said Anatoliy Gliberman, a computer science major who was one of the first to notify the board about potential problems with the birth date passwords.
After noticing about 90 questionable votes out of a total of 300, election officials quickly canceled the voting. The election is expected to be rescheduled for later this semester.
