On Sunday, UND announced the results of the nickname vote, and as expected no nickname reached the required 50 percent of the vote necessary to win outright.

In this situation, the two nicknames that received the most votes would be entered into a runoff election, which was anticipated to take place in early November. This vote would have been between the top two names, Fighting Hawks and Roughriders.

However, President Kelley decided that these rules would be changed, and that the third place option, Nodaks, would be added to the runoff election.

We believe that this decision is wrong. When President Kelley was interviewed for a story on the nickname vote earlier this year, he claimed that even if he believed that North Dakota was a nickname option, he didn’t want to circumvent the process that was set in place to select a nickname.

He does not appear to hold the same opinion in the case of Nodaks.

The reasoning provided for this decision in the announcement email was that the vote differential between the second place Roughriders and the third place Nodaks was only 116 votes, and that small of a margin meant that both options should included.

This reasoning however is extremely flawed. In the system that was setup to conduct the vote, voters were asked to choose their favorite option. This was supposed to lead to a two option runoff, but that has been denied. The voters chose to eliminate the option of Nodaks by half of a percent, and that decision should have been final.

By placing Nodaks into the final runoff vote, President Kelley not only denied the will of the voters, but he also created a situation in which the eventual winner of the runoff election might not even receive fifty percent of the vote.

If the goal of this election was to choose a nickname that would be supported at UND, then creating a situation in which more than half of voters didn’t support the final nickname is not accomplishing this goal in anyway. If the final vote results in a nickname being chosen with less than half of the voters choosing it, then the process and the voters have been failed.

This is the situation that President Kelley has created.

When the rules were set in place, they were set in place to solve the nickname decision as cleanly as possible, and in deciding to add Nodaks to the list of runoff candidates, President Kelley has defied these rules in a misguided effort to offer greater choice to voters.

We hope to see this decision reversed.