Brennan AngelAssociated Students Inc. will continue its campus-wide test of a new electronic voting system today in the UU Plaza and the Robert E. Kennedy Library from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
ASI hopes to get at least 300 students to the voting stations to test the new system in the future and to be sure that there are no technical problems with logging in.
The test ballot will ask students if they like the new form of voting, which political party they’re affiliated with and their favorite 2008 presidential candidates.
“We were trying to create questions that we thought the students would respond well to and would want to turn out and vote for,” said Mia White, ASI Elections chair and nutrition senior.
The new electronic system would be more cost-effective and less time-consuming than the paper ballots that ASI used in past years.
“We have to print out a separate ballot for each college and have one available for every student in case they want to vote. We feel it wastes a lot of paper and is a lot more time-consuming,” White said.
The electronic system would also require less staff to pay for since it’s mostly electronic. The system tallies the votes throughout the day and e-mails the results to ASI shortly after the polls close.
“This year it will cost us a little bit extra because of the extra testing but in the long run, it will save us time and money,” White said.
There will still be paper ballots on hand for any students who are uncomfortable with the idea of electronic voting and as a back-up in case there are any technological difficulties.
“We’ve interviewed a couple of other campuses that use the same vendor that we will be using for the test run and we haven’t heard of anybody having any problems,” she said. “We wanted to do our own test run to make sure it works with our software. We’ll probably know by Friday if we want to move forward in using the new system this year.”
The vendor, Elexpert, has over six years of experience and has worked with at least 30 colleges.
“We have a pretty good feeling that they know what they’re doing,” White said.
“Electronic voting seems like a step up from using paper ballots, for students voting and for the people behind the scenes. The thought of all of the votes being tallied electronically doesn’t worry me at all,” communications studies senior Andrew Pipes said. “It would especially increase the voter turnout if we could vote from our computers at home.”
The electronic voting, for this year at least, will only be held on campus. White said they will consider making it available for personal computers in upcoming years, which might increase the voter turnout and make it possible for students studying abroad and with busy schedules to vote.
ASI has a few concerns with making voting available at home that they must address before making the transition, including incidents reported from other schools of increases in bribery and pressuring from candidates.
“We don’t want any sort of fraud. We want our election to be as fair as possible,” White said.