Alleged irregularities in the nominating process for the Homecoming king and queen have raised question as to whether the selection process for homecoming royalty should be revised next year.

“I think that if someone wants to be Homecoming king or queen that badly, it’s not a huge deal to this campus. It’s not causing any uproar or disappointment. If it were, we would probably reevaluate it, but it hasn’t,” said senior Ally Veneris, co-chair of the Traditions Committee on the DU Programs Board.

A student who is familiar with and examined the nominations told The Clarion that the number of nomination responses was not limited per computer.

According to the source, a person could enter his or her own name 100 times in a row and it would have been logged.

Nominations were solicited through SurveyMonkey.com and did not collect IP addresses or other unique identifiers. Unique identifies can be used to limit the number of responses per computer. The default setting on SurveyMonkey.com allows one response per computer.

This was changed for the nomination voting to allow voting from public computers such as the library, Veneris said.

“We knew you could vote more than once,” Veneris said. “We did that so that you could let it count more than once. If someone was voting from the library, Student Life computers or various other buildings, you wouldn’t be able to vote on that computer.”

The process has been this way for three years, according to Veneris.

Seniors Courtney Sparks and Antoine Perretta were named queen and king, but the final tallies were not made available to The Clarion, although Student Life staff was asked.

Final voting was solicited through WebCentral, which allowed for only one vote per student ID number.

The Clarion analysis is based solely on the nominating sheets that were given to The Clarion by a student who had access to them.

In the nominating process, Sparks received 109 nominations, 30 of which were in a row, cast at the same time. There were 187 nominations before Sparks was nominated again. Another 261 names were nominated before Sparks received a group of 22 nominations.

Perretta, undergraduate student body president, was nominated 39 times. Of these, 17 votes were in a row and these were misspelled ‘Antoine Peretta.’

Of the votes for Perretta, 32 were misspelled. Twenty-eight of these misspellings were paired with nominations for Sparks.

The runner-up for Homecoming queen nominations was senior Lynsey Simon, with 38 votes, none of which were in large blocks.

The runner up for Homecoming king nominations was senior Bryan Bassman, with 60 votes, 21 more than Perretta, who was named king. 

Bassman received 20 nominations in one block and his name was listed 12 in another.

A total of 863 nominations was submitted.

In the nomination process, anyone in or outside of the DU community could have nominated students in the online process, however, only undergraduates could cast a final vote to select the king and queen.

More than 4,000 undergraduates were eligible to cast a final vote.

Anyone interested in examining the nominating sheets should contact The Clarion at du.clarion@du.edu.

Leslie Gehring and Rachel Conkey contributed to this report.