After requests to extend the special fees petition deadline in response to a glitch in the petition Web site, the ASSU Elections Commission has pushed back the deadline to Monday at noon. The petitioning process was originally set to close at noon today.

Various student groups hoping to receive special fees funding next year must first petition to be placed on the ballot for the spring election. Organizations are required to receive a specific number of signatures varying by group from 10 percent of the undergraduate population to 15 percent of the total University population.

Several groups were still far off from reaching their signature quota before today’s deadline. For example, the Journal of International Relations was about 300 signatures short yesterday and the Queer/Straight Alliance was missing 140.

Their frustration with the deadline stemmed from a truncated petitioning period. After the opening of the two-week petitioning period on Feb. 22, the Elections Commission realized that the link to the budgets for each organization was malfunctioning. According to the ASSU Constitution, collecting signatures without attaching budgets is unconstitutional. As a result, the Commission restarted the petitions for every organization.

The Elections Commission then contacted all students that had previously signed any petitions and requested that they resign them.

Financial officers from several petitioning groups circulated and signed another petition in order to persuade ASSU Elections Commissioner Ryan Woessner ‘10 to push back the due date. Although Woessner had initially informed all petitioning organizations that they would not be granted an extension, he acceded to their request.

“I noticed there were quite a few groups that would not be able to reach their marks by tomorrow,” Woessner said yesterday. “They asked for two and a half more days, and I thought it was perfectly fine. If they need more time, they need more time.”

Petitioning groups pushed for a deadline extension because they believed the malfunctioning Web site was not under their control. Although financial officers recognized the efforts of the Election Commission to compensate for the signatures by contacting students again, the organizations still felt that they had lost valuable time to collect signatures.

“I don’t like it that our groups get seemingly punished for a glitch that we didn’t cause,” Tommy Tobin ‘10, business editor of the Stanford Journal of International Relations, said in an email to The Daily. “We had 200 signatures that were thrown out.”

A total of nine groups, including Stanford Mock Trial, Stanford Dance Marathon, Stanford Women in Business and Queer/Straight Alliance, signed the petition.

— Devin Banerjee contributed to this report.