Ohio States Undergraduate Student Government elections opened Wednesday at noon, but not without at least one hiccup.

Voting in the USG Social and Behavioral Sciences senatorial race created issues for some constituents, who reported they were not seeing SBS appearing as a choice for academic college to vote for their SBS representatives, said Tyler Byrum, chief justice of the USG Judicial Panel and a third-year in engineering physics.

This seemed to be a problem for people for about the first several hours of voting but, to my knowledge, it is not anymore, said Byrum in an email at about 7 p.m. Wednesday.

The Judicial Panel is responsible for ensuring the validity of USG elections.

Byrum said he assumed the problem was fixed but that students can manually change the college selection option on the ballot, then can choose SBS and vote for the five Senate seat candidates in that category.

Byrum said the glitch will not influence the presidential election, where candidates Taylor Stepp, a third-year in public affairs, and Josh Ahart, a third-year in public affairs, are running unopposed on the ballot. Jacob Coate, a second-year in political science, and James Prather, a second-year in finance, are running as write-in candiates.

However, how the situation would be handled had yet to be determined Wednesday evening.

In order to try and make these elections as fair as possible, the SBS candidates are going to be asked if they would like to do a run-off election, Byrum said in the email.

A run-off election would take place over a span of a day or two, which Byrum said would likely be next week. This isnt the first time something like this has occurred, Byrum said a run-off election was held for Natural and Mathematical Sciences several years ago, but said he wasnt able to find a specific procedure for holding one.

The SBS candidates include Erik Leiden,a second-year in international business and political science, Jen Tripi, a student in psychology, Kristen Cowan,a student in neuroscience, Michael Flannagan, a student in political science, and Michael Periatt, a third-year in political science and journalism, who is on The Lanterns staff.

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Voting glitch affects USG Social and Behavioral Sciences senatorial race