Student groups petitioning to be on the ASSU special fees ballot suffered a setback early yesterday morning. A glitch with the petitioning Web site over the past couple days invalidated hundreds of signatures, sending groups back to square one before the Mar. 7 deadline.

Elections Commissioner Ryan Woessner ‘10 emailed the nine groups then petitioning for special fees at 1:14 a.m. with the message that the commission was “forced to close the petition . . . until further notice” and when reopened “[the Elections Commission] will have to ask each petitioning group to restart their petition.”

Woessner later explained that numerous signatures accumulated over the previous two days were completed without a working link to the budget breakdown for each group applying.

While individual petition sites state the dollar amount requested by a group, according to the ASSU constitution by-laws, “the information pages in each petition shall contain . . . the detailed budget for the organization submitted for the following fiscal year.”

“The Elections Commission and the ASSU are very sorry for any inconvenience that this error has caused,” Woessner told The Daily, noting that the petition sites are expected to be back online today. “The error was due to a miscommunication between groups involved, and we’re doing our best to fix the problem.”

According to Woessner, he was first notified about problems with the petitioning sites by various students on Wednesday afternoon. Links for the petitioning sites had been sent to each group’s financial officer for publicity on Tuesday night; soon after, students noticed that the budget links for many groups were broken.

“It’s not a perfect system,” Woessner said. “Once it was obvious that multiple budgets were not available, I decided to shut down the process.”

Student groups expressed disappointment over the invalidation of hundreds of signatures. Leland Quarterly had nearly 150 signatures out of 663 required; the Bridge Peer Counseling Group had 322 out of 1000; and Stanford Journal of International Relations (SJIR) had nearly 200 out of 726, according to group representatives.

Stanford News Readership Program (SNRP), Volunteers in Latin America (VILA), Alternative Spring Break (ASB), Stanford Comedy Club, Muslim Student Awareness Network (MSAN) and Stanford in Government (SIG) were also affected.

“First of all, it’s just shocking that this all happened,” said Nick Hoy ‘08, editor in chief of Leland Quarterly. “Second, it’s shocking that the ASSU’s solution is for student groups to start over again.”

While group officials understand that Woessner stood by constitutional bylaws in his decision, many questioned the effectiveness and fairness of such rules.

“I don’t really think having the budget makes or breaks someone’s signature,” said Tommy Tobin ‘10, financial officer for SJIR. “I understand that it’s part of the constitution, but once people get to the site, it’s highly likely that they will sign anyway.”

“The difficulty lies in getting people to the site,” Tobin added, “and often groups will include in their emails information pertaining to their group or provide links explaining why they should receive special fees.”

Aaron Qayumi ‘09, president of SNRP, also had difficulty grasping the importance of students viewing a budget. Even if the budget is available, few are likely to peruse it simply for petitioning, he said.

“People can already see the total amount we’re requesting, and there’s lots of time before the actual election for people to look at the budget,” he said. “I do see how there’s a problem, but I don’t see how it’s enough to throw out all those signatures.”

Laurence Moore ‘08, financial officer for the Bridge, added that the presence of an “amount requested” sufficiently informed students of their potential student fees liability. In addition, the fact that so many students signed the petitions without an available budget “obviously showed they’re willing to pay the money.”

The decision to invalidate signatures was further complicated because many students likely did sign petitions with working budget links. According to Woessner, however, “there’s just no way of differentiating the signatures of people who were able to view the budget.”

He added that were the signatures counted, the Elections Commission would be liable to a suit. He was unable to cite a case similar to this situation — and Hoy and Tobin expressed doubt that a suit would occur over something like this — but Woessner said there has been a history of suits against the commission.

Student groups also took issue that a technical glitch occurred with a site long in development.

“I’m surprised by this,” Moore said. “They’ve had about five months now to set up and test this site. We’ve all written a paper and forgotten to save it, so I’m somewhat understanding of technical glitches on the part of the Elections Commission, but this is still a big deal. For us, it’s a whole year of funding on the line.”

According to Woessner, the special fees petitioning site was developed by Stanford Student Enterprises’ Internet Solutions group. He said that the site had been tested “on and off” late last quarter and at the beginning of this quarter.

Before sending out the petition links to groups, Woessner himself also checked that each page was fully functioning. He added that miscommunication between last year’s and this year’s site developers contributed to issues with the system and the lack of a rapid fix over the past few days before all the sites had to be shut down.

With the sites expected to reopen today, groups will have to restart their efforts to rally members and reach out to students for their signatures. Woessner said that all students who signed a petition and submitted a valid email address will be officially contacted by the ASSU and asked to sign again, but group officials expressed concern over potential confusion and a small return rate.

“Even if we explain the situation to people when we send out another email, we’re going to lose a significant number of people because of the ASSU’s debacle,” Hoy said. He noted that, “the electronic petition is already an onus on small groups like ours,” as email spamming is not as successful as the paper petitioning of past years.

The daunting prospect of reclaiming signatures and garnering new ones within the next two weeks led groups to suggest further solutions, including a reduction in the number of signatures required by each group as well as an extension of the Mar. 7 deadline to compensate for lost time.

Woessner said that the Elections Commission did not guarantee groups a set amount of time for petitioning — just a deadline — so he is reluctant to consider an extension. Extra days would mean more email spam for the general student body, and Woessner said he believes that groups should be able to overcome any confusion and have enough time to collect all the necessary signatures. Woessner added that noon today is the official deadline for groups to apply for petitioning, and the two weeks of petitioning left are still more than afforded in past years.

“It’s not that we don’t want to work with groups,” Woessner said of the Elections Commission’s decision over the process. “It’s that we want to make sure things happen right.”

Still, groups said that they hoped there would be more understanding from the ASSU, as well as greater recognition of the effort put in by the groups.

“Because the problem originated on their part, I would hope they would be more lenient and understanding and help compensate for the loss,” Qayumi said. “I understand a lot of hard work is involved with this and [the Elections Commission] puts in a lot of hours — this is really regretful for all of us. I just hope we can work something out that makes more sense from the student group perspective.”

Like other student groups, though, Hoy recognized that these concerns now take a back seat to moving on and collecting valid signatures.

“We don’t have a choice,” he said. “We need to get signatures, we need to get on the ballot and we need to get approved.”