E-mail voting revolutionizes graduate-student elections
By Ryan Ozimek
Daily Bruin Contributor
Hoping to increase voter turnout while also spending less of an
already small budget, the Graduate Students Association (GSA) will
make use of e-mail and the World Wide Web for this year’s general
election.
Mass e-mail distribution to graduate students with university
registered e-mail accounts will begin on or around April 15, and
ballots will need to be returned on April 30.
Each of these graduate students will receive two separate
e-mails. The first will give a brief description of each of the
candidate’s platforms along with details on any amendments to the
association’s constitution.
Graduate students who don’t have access to on-campus e-mail
accounts will still be able to cast their ballots. The registrar’s
office is creating a World Wide Web page to allow students to
connect to a page containing the same information available through
e-mail.
One of the primary concerns with these new voting techniques was
isolating voting constituents without e-mail accounts. As internal
Vice President Kevin Welner said, "It’s a good idea as long as
those who don’t have e-mail still have the opportunity to
vote."
For now, at least, students can continue voting by paper and
pencil if they do not have e-mail access by going to the graduate
government office. But officials said that they created the
electronic balloting as a way to make a more user-friendly general
election.
With a voter turnout of 8 percent during last year’s general
election and 9 percent the year before, the association needed
something to increase graduate student participation.
"(The association) needs a 10 percent voter turnout in order to
pass constitutional amendments which include increasing GSA
membership fees to run the central office," said Katherine
Crosswhite, commissioner of elections.
With less than 10 percent of the graduate student body voting in
the past few years of elections, the government’s budget has
remained mostly static during that time. Even though student fee
increases have passed overwhelming in past elections, no formal
action has taken place to increase the budget because of the lack
of votes.
"I look at the new process as being positive and hopefully
increasing voter participation to the critical 10 percent mark,"
said association President John Shapley.
In the past, graduate students voted at stations placed
throughout the campus just like undergraduates. But because
graduate students are not on campus as much, the success of
graduate voting booths has historically been much less than
undergraduate booths. And the high cost of maintaining an
ineffective voting booth has become increasingly expensive for the
financially strapped institution.
Trying to extend deeper into the pool of graduate students, the
association began sending out mail ballots to listed students. But
voter turnout remained very low, while postage and paper costs were
high.
"The mail ballot process asked a lot of the students to go
through the whole process of voting and opened up more chances for
problems," Crosswhite said.
With an electronic general election, the graduate government
hopes to increase voter turnout by giving the students an election
process that is quick and easy.
After checking their e-mail, a student would need simply to
identify themselves using their student identification number and
possibly the last four digits of their social security number,
answer a few questions, and then hit the reply button.
"Katherine has to be credited for moving the GSA election
process into the 21st century," Shapley said.
The process of collecting and counting the electronic ballots
has ben taken up by the university registrar’s office. Using a
program that will allow their computers to be text-sensitive to the
sender’s response, the registrar’s office will be able to quickly
and accurately count ballots.
A prominent concern among many students and association members
is the possibility of fraud that could come in an all-electric
election. According to Crosswhite, transmission of identification
over the network seemed rather safe, but identification of senders
may be a slightly tougher problem to overcome.
Officials explained that computer security measures will
automatically delete any repeat ballots and will keep the original
ballot.
Students who believe that someone may have tampered with their
e-mail ballot can go to the association office in Kerckhoff Hall
and vote in person, which will take precedence over any electronic
vote that someone may have made using their e-mail account.
"I think that we have created a system that will work without
many problems," Crosswhite predicted.Comments to
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