Tuesday, the day of general elections, some University of Alabama students who registered to vote through the SGA Voter Drive discovered they were ineligible to vote in Tuscaloosa.
The drive was held in early October and designed to be a civic engagement initiative to get more students to vote on campus. The SGA representatives provided the required paperwork for students and said they would take care of making sure it was turned in and processed.
Kyle Borland, a senior majoring in public relations, was among the students who discovered they were not registered to vote in Tuscaloosa as they originally thought.
“I am frustrated because I feel I wasn’t able to exercise my constitutional right,” Borland said.
Mackenzie Brown, director of SGA media relations, said he was first made aware of the problem around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday via tweets sent to the SGA Twitter account. He said he then alerted SGA president Hamilton Bloom, and the vice president of external affairs, Drew Bridges. Brown said more students approached SGA representatives throughout the day expressing similar voting problems.
Borland said he checked online at alabamavotes.com Tuesday morning to see where he was registered, only to discover he was not registered in Tuscaloosa. Borland called AlabamaVotes and said he was told they had no record of receiving his paperwork.
It is unknown at the time of publication if the paperwork was never turned in or if there was a mistake made after voter registration paperwork was turned in.
Brown said the SGA decided to begin an internal investigation and not alert students they were aware of the problem until the SGA has “everything in line.”
“We are still learning exactly what happened to create this inconvenience,” he said.
Brown estimates the SGA should have answers for students by the end of the week.