Friday, May 3 1996
Walk-in voting was for those without electronic access
By Katherine Crosswhite
I am writing to respond to a letter written by Jo Anne Beazley
published in the April 30 issue of the Daily Bruin ("Candid
ballot"). Beazley correctly reports that for a few days, the
Graduate Students Association was requiring walk-in voters to
supply their UCLA identification number on their paper ballots and
that this measure was intended to block the possibility of double
balloting.
However, the missing piece of the story is that Graduate
Students Association (GSA) voting also took place this year by
e-mail and the World Wide Web. I hope that the UCLA
graduate/professional student community can appreciate the fact
that an e-mail ballot is completely worthless unless it can be
determined whether it was turned in by an eligible voter  and
reg cards can be neither verified, punched nor stamped via e-mail.
Similarly, punching the reg cards of walk-in voters would do
nothing to keep these people from filling out a second ballot via
e-mail or World Wide Web.
Of course, the GSA Elections Board realized that running the
elections by e-mail would mean a certain lack of confidentiality.
However, we reasoned that the World Wide Web voting method would
make up for this. Although UCLA ID numbers were also required for
Web voting, Web voter eligibility was verified on-line by the
Registrar’s Office, allowing Web ballots to be processed
confidentially.
The walk-in balloting was not intended to provide a second
method for confidential balloting. Rather, it was intended to
provide a means of balloting for those students who either do not
have e-mail or who choose not to use e-mail. Therefore, the walk-in
voters were simply given a paper printout of the e-mail ballot
(with the e-mail instructions deleted).
I am truly sorry if Beazley or any other graduate students had
expected something different for walk-in balloting. Walk-in
balloting was always billed by the Graduate Students Association as
a method for nonelectronic voting  not as a method for
avoiding use of registration numbers.
When I heard from the GSA staff that a woman had come to the
office to vote, and then refused to do so due to the registration
number issue, I immediately made arrangements to change the paper
balloting procedure to provide greater confidentiality  even
though this was not our original intent. I required processing all
the paper ballots by a completely separate process before the
electronic ballots could be counted. (Fortunately, there were only
37 paper ballots.) However, the woman in question had not left her
name, so I was unable to contact her to inform her of these
changes, or to tell her that she could have voted confidentially
via the Web to begin with.
I will make certain that next year’s Elections Board takes these
matters into consideration when making plans for future balloting
procedures. We welcome input from all graduate students, especially
concerning GSA elections and balloting procedures.
However, I regret that graduate students feel they must turn to
the Daily Bruin to air their concerns rather than contacting the
Graduate Students Association directly. In this case, the
misunderstanding could have been easily fixed. Any other graduate
students with comments and/or suggestions can address their
concerns to GSA directly at gsa@asucla.ucla.edu.
Crosswhite is a graduate student in linguistics and the
commissioner of elections for the Graduate Students Association.The
walk-in balloting was not intended to provide a second method for
confidential voting…. I regret that graduate students feel they
must turn to the Daily Bruin to air their concerns rather than
contacting the Graduate Students Association directly.