Washington
The American Association of University Professors must redo an election it held last year after an investigation by the U.S. Department of Labor found irregularities that it believes could have affected the election results.
The faculty group will hold a new vote for members of the National Council, its governing body, and for the chair of the Assembly of State Conferences, an umbrella organization of all of the state AAUP conferences.
The Labor Department, in a notice issued last month, detailed several problems—most of them linked to electronic voting—that it says could have changed the outcome of the 2011 election. Among other problems, the department said that:
- A third-party ballotting agent could determine how AAUP members had voted.
- A person who was not an AAUP member was a candidate.
- Some AAUP members did not receive an electronic ballot even though they had provided the association with a personal e-mail address.
The department and the association reached a voluntary compliance agreement that calls for the department to supervise the repeat election (for which new nominations are now being solicited) and the regularly scheduled 2012 election for national officers and council members. The two elections will be held concurrently, said Kathi Wescott, the association's senior counsel.
Although the AAUP has used electronic ballots for the past four years, it has agreed to mail members paper ballots for this year's elections. The ballots will go out next month to 38,000 of the association's members who are eligible to vote, Ms. Wescott said, and the votes will be tallied in mid-April, as usual.
The AAUP redid one other election, its 2009 vote for the Assembly of State Conferences, after a single complaint was filed by Virginia M. Fichera, an adjunct professor of linguistics at the State University of New York's campus in Binghamton. Ms. Fichera, who has complained about AAUP procedures over the years, also alerted the department about issues related to the 2011 election.
Correction (4:21 p.m.): This article originally misstated the nature of the Labor Department's findings. The department found that the irregularities could have affected the election results, not that they definitely did affect the results. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
