By Kyle Peveto, Opinion Editor

The Association of Computerized Machinery received a grant of $3,600 in the Students’ Association’s new budget and will handle elections online.

SA has used Scantron voting in the past, but now the ACM will offer technical assistance after setting up the online voting process.

Funds provided by SA in the new budget will go toward the ACM purchasing and installing servers to run the new online voting program. The ACM already receives funds toward operating costs each year.

“SA actually granted the ACM $3,400 for the E-vote project; the remainder of the amount [$236] was ACM’s standard budget,” said Christopher Smith, ACM vice president and senior computer science and physics major from College Station.

After researching online voting programs, the ACM decided to write its own program, called E-Vote, and work toward providing it free of charge to any organization on campus that may want to use online voting, said Chris Lemmons, president of the ACM and junior computer science major from Tucson, Ariz.

SA will have the server to run the E-Vote program, which was written free of charge as a service project, and the ACM will keep a development server on which the program will be created. ACM will support the program and offer online help pages to any organization wishing to use E-Vote.

The ACM will try to make the program free to all organizations but may not be able to make that possible. Lemmons said the ACM will work with Information Technology to run E-Vote from myACU.

“We haven’t made a lot of promises because we don’t know what to do yet,” Lemmons said.

The ACM decided to write its own software designed to be a secure server. Other online voting programs were not secure.