When members of the Homecoming Court were announced this morning, rumors began to swirl through the hallways that the electronic voting system was hacked. However, officials involved in the process remain skeptical.

School-based technology specialist Mike Hanpeter, who set up the system at the request of the leadership group, believes that it was was secure.

“It’s double protected,” Henpeter said. “You have to log-in to Blackboard to then log-in through a site, so you can’t log-in to the site without going through Blackboard first, and Blackboard  traces who the user is. There is statistical tracking on there too and it tracks by IP address, so you can tell exactly when every vote is cast, where it’s cast from, and who is logged-in to be able to cast it.”

Senior executive council member Kacey Hirshfeld thinks that the results could have been skewed by a lack of student voting though. She was not permitted to see all of the data, but when she looked at the numbers of students that voted she noticed that only a small proportion of each class was actually represented.

“Because a small number of people voted, the results weren’t what everyone expected, but the people who expected different results didn’t vote,” Hirshfeld said.

Hirshfeld noticed a general trend in voter turnout between grade levels.

“Sophomores had the most votes, then freshmen and juniors, and then seniors,” Hirshfeld said.