On Wednesday afternoon, Colorado Mesa University President Tim Foster sent an email to all faculty and staff, stating the name that was chosen for the engineering building could perhaps be rescinded. In the email, Foster stated that the results “might have involved some innovative voting behaviors, that could have influenced the outcome.”

The final voting ended on Sunday, Oct. 8 at midnight, and the results were announced Tuesday afternoon. The voting consisted of fourteen options, all of which came from students.

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The name that earned the most votes was Kokopelli Hall. When faculty reviewed the results, they seemed “more than suspicious.” Kokopelli won by an extremely large margin, 1663 votes, followed by the name Redlands hall, which received 583 votes. CMU Director of Media Relations Dana Nunn said, “I was extremely surprised to see that 5,812 votes had been cast, that’s a much larger amount than the last [Associated Student Government] election.”

Faculty predicted that the election for the name of the new building would be clean and reliable; however, there is an evident reason to believe that it was not. The survey was put out on “survey monkey” with the hope that students would only vote for one name, one time.

“We set this up on the honor system and were well aware that the system we were using would track IP addresses or leave a cookie; however, we also know our students are smart enough to know how to clear cookies,” Nunn said.

Although Kokopelli obtained the highest number of votes, it appears that there was suspicious voting on other options as well.

Faculty, including Foster, had hoped to include alumni in the voting process as well, which is the reason why the voting was not through OrgSync. “Orgsync requires voters to enter their 700 number, which alumni do not have,” Nunn said.

This is not the first time CMU has allowed students to choose the names of the buildings. There was also a poll for the naming of Dominguez and Escalante Halls, when Escalante was first built.

Those whose nominations won were offered a prize of an iPad. This incentive was offered in order to encourage students to take part in the voting process.

“It is probably futile to speculate on motive. Do they just love their chosen name so much? Did they nominate that name to increase the likelihood of winning an iPad? I don’t know,” Nunn said. “I’m not sure what anyone’s incentive would have been to hack the system, an iPad is only worth $329, and to be honest we were planning on giving away more than one.”