Undergraduates made a positive case for online voting last week
when they approved a fee referendum that injects a fiscal shot in
the arm of their student government.
Seven hundred eleven votes provided the margin of victory for
the referendum, approved by 57.2 percent of those who voted. Due in
a large part to its online voting format, the referendum drew the
largest voter turnout of the past few years.
“The turnout is impressive,” said Elections Board
Chairman Chris Abraham. “We enfranchised a lot of
voters.”
With 4,967 students casting an online ballot via the MyUCLA Web
site, the election attracted more voters than the last two general
officer elections for the Undergraduate Students Association
Council.
“(Increased turnout) was because of online voting. It made
for easier access,” said USAC President David Dahle.
He added that he favors expanding the use of online voting in
future elections, and the referendum election’s turnout
“is a testament to it.”
This past week’s election marks the third time in the past
two years that council has decided to go online. In 2000 an online
election was held to elect a replacement external vice president,
and last spring a similar referendum went to the Web but failed to
meet minimum voter turnout of more than 10 percent approval.
The current referendum increases the quarterly fee USAC collects
from undergraduates from $24.09 to $33.34 ““ an increase of
$9.25. Its passage comes at a key time for council, when increased
overhead costs slashed its budget by $30,000 this past year.
The increase translates to an estimated boost of $210,000 to
their existing $98,000 in student programming funds.
Most of the money is earmarked for specific council offices
““ campus events, community service, cultural affairs,
external vice president and student welfare ““Â and the
rest will go toward two general programming funds available to
student groups.
Dahle had repeatedly said leading up to the election that
council was in “dire need of funding” and was at risk
of having to eliminate some of its programming and services for
students. Many of the council offices and large student groups on
campus had their base budgets cut by half or more this year.
“I’m extremely happy,” Dahle said.
“Hopefully more groups can seek funding, and this will help
established groups as well.”
Campus Events Commissioner Ryan Wilson pushed for the referendum
because his office ““Â which works on projects like weekly
movie screenings and campus concerts ““ had not received
a budget increase since 1985.
But even with the item’s passage, many groups slated to
benefit from the increase in funding continue to disagree with the
process by which the referendum was written.
Groups like the Muslim Student Association, which saw its base
budget drop from $5,203 in 2001 to $2,060 in 2002 and appealed
unsuccessfully for more funding, said the referendum is a hasty
bailout for USAC’s budget problems.
“The principle behind the fees was to correct someone
else’s (mistake),” said MSA President Mohammad
Mertaban. “The process should be more important than the
outcome.”
As for the distribution of the newly acquired funds, Budget
Review Director Justin Levi said those plans “are yet to be
determined.”
“There are a lot of options on the table,” he
said.
Some of the preliminary options, Levi said, include
redistributing funds to groups proportional to the percentage they
received from the original $98,000 budget, reconsidering student
group budget proposals, or creating an entirely new budget
process.