Students were elected to fill three seats on the Student Judiciary, as well as three seats in the Student Union Senate and the post of senior representative to the Alumni Association in yesterday's Union elections, according to an email to the Justice from Union Secretary Todd Kirkland '13.

With the election of three new justices, the judiciary's five seats will now be filled. This election marked the third attempt since last spring to fill all five seats.

The winning candidates for the seats were Zach Breslaw '15, John Fonte '12 and Claire Sinai '15.

For the positions of Charles River senator, senator for the Mods and racial minority senator, the winners, respectively, were Deena Horowitz '13, Betsy Hinchey '12 and Jonathan Beaver '15. Destiny Aquino '12 was elected senior representative to the Alumni Association.

According to earlier emails to the Justice from Kirkland and Union President Herbie Rosen '12, both the "abstain" and "skip" options were reworded for this election and calculated as if they were candidates by BigPulse, the online voting system used by the Union.

In the earlier email, Kirkland explained that for this election, the wording for the "Abstain" option was changed to "No vote/Abstain" so that BigPulse would "analyze the results in a way that better fits our election guidelines."

Article IX of the Union constitution states, "If abstain receives the greatest number of votes during a final election, than [sic] there will be a vacancy in the office until the next election."

According to Rosen, the wording of the "skip" option was changed to "Skip ballot and continue" in order to clarify the option and to have it act as a candidate so that data for the number of students selecting it would be generated, allowing the Union to better gauge overall student participation rates.

Rosen also noted that in reading the system's elections results, the votes toward the "skip" option would be "disregarded" by Union officials.

In a phone interview with the Justice, Fonte said "I feel good. Justice has been served. The abstain thing had been quite an error. Abstention was quite a candidate, but I beat it fair and square."

In a phone interview with the Justice, Breslaw, another one of the winners for the SJ, said, "It was a good win."

Yesterday's election was originally scheduled for last Monday. However, the election's date was moved back because the student elected as senior representative to the Alumni Association declined to serve in that capacity, and the Union wanted time to "gather more candidates," according to Kirkland in an Oct. 13 email to campus media outlets.

Kirkland also noted that the move would "give people more time to campaign, and allow us to look deeper into our current election system with BigPulse."

Last month, a Justice examination of Union election data from 2010 and 2011 revealed a conflict between election procedures concerning the "abstain" option and instant runoff voting.

That conflict caused a vote-tallying system that distributed votes to candidates in a way that was likely inconsistent with voters' intentions, especially for multi-position elections such as those for the judiciary. This system may have prevented Fonte and Sinai from winning positions on the Judiciary in the last election.

—Andrew Wingens and Eitan Cooper contributed reporting.