[media-credit name=’BRYAN FAUST/Herald photo’ align=’alignnone’ width=’648′][/media-credit]Nearly 11 hours after postponing the Associated Students of Madison online election, the Student Election Commission resolved the situation Wednesday by dividing the ballot into two parts and reopening their vote on separate dates.

If the Department of Information Technology can create and test a new voting module in time, the referendum section of the election would resume today at noon and run until 11:59 p.m. Friday. If DoIT cannot put in place a corrected voting module in time, the referendum portion would resume April 3 at 8 a.m. and conclude 8 p.m. April 4.

Elections for Student Council seats will reopen at 8 a.m. April 5 to 8 p.m. April 7.

Citing a "technical error" in its online database that potentially prevented some students from voting as they intended, the SEC originally postponed the ASM election at 1 p.m. Wednesday afternoon, just one day after the election began.

And as the SEC met Wednesday evening to discuss the situation, representatives were seriously considering throwing out all votes cast — for both the referendums on the ballot and the Student Council seats — and beginning a new election.

However, since DoIT officials said they have not discarded any ballots that were successfully cast and currently have them stored in their database, all previous votes on the two referendums will be counted. Students who already successfully cast votes for the referendums will not be able to vote again on the referendums.

This will not be the case for Student Council seat votes, though.

Since certain Student Council elections were "tainted," because a technical error prevented some students from casting their vote as they intended, all previous Student Council candidate votes will be discarded and all students will be allowed to re-vote for Student Council candidates.

SEC members called the resolution the "best solution possible," given the difficult situation.

"This way, I think, is the way that protects the most people's legal ability to make sure that their vote is counted," SEC Vice Chair Joshua Tyack said. "Those 6,000 students who already voted, their vote will be protected."

With the highly contentious Wisconsin Union and Living Wage referendums on the ballot, the announcement to postpone the ASM online election was made while in the midst of a reported record level of student turnout — an estimated 15 percent of the student body voted on the first day alone.

However, on Tuesday, the day the election began, it became evident to SEC members — which oversees the student-government elections — and DoIT officials — who created the online database used in the election — that some students were potentially prevented from casting their vote.

The error occurred when students attempting to cast votes for multiple write-in candidates for Student Council representative could not complete the process of confirming their ballot, instead receiving an error message on their computer.

DoIT Senior Programming Specialist Brian Rust said both DoIT and ASM tested the voting module that was used, however, an unforeseen error occurred while updating its database between the time the module was approved and when it was opened up to students.

Vested parties expressed differing opinions on SEC's ultimate decision.

"It was really unfair, because there were elections that were not tainted and they could've gotten [those] votes back," Candidate for Student Council Zach Frey said, referring to the votes being discarded for Student Council.

However, Ashok Kumar, a member Student Labor Action Coalition which sponsored the Living Wage Referendum, said "They're leaving … the votes for the referendum in, so in that sense it's good, because they're keeping the votes that are for sure good."