By Jonathan Smith, Editor in Chief
The Students’ Association and Web Integration and Programming will finally unveil electronic voting Wednesday after Chapel as students will be able to vote in class senator elections on my.ACU.
Elections were slated to begin Monday and end Wednesday, but problems found in the electronic voting program pushed SA elections chair Patrick Leech, sophomore history major from Tuscola, to delay the elections two days.
“We decided it would be best to move back the day of voting to use e-vote and follow through with what we said we were going to do,” Leech said.
During testing of the e-vote program last week, Leech said problems arose when trying to allow students to vote for certain groups of senators.
Students are supposed to vote for class senators in whichever class they qualify, but students can decide which class they will vote with based on either their years or hours.
With Scantron balloting, students simply could place their ballot in the box that corresponded with their class. With e-vote, the computer only allowed students to vote with a class based on hours completed.
Leech said to solve this problem, he sent out a mass e-mail Monday allowing students the opportunity to respond and choose to vote with a different class in which they qualify.
When the problems were discovered with the system, Leech said he reported those to Dr. James Langford, director of Web Integration and Programming, whose team fixed the problem.
Instead of trying to use a faulty e-vote system or use paper balloting, Leech said he decided it would be better to push back the elections.
Electronic voting was first supposed to be available with SA’s executive office elections March 30 through April 1, but because the beginning of voting would directly correspond with the beginning of freshman class registration, Langford said he made the decision that electronic voting could not happen. Langford said that would not be an issue this time.
“It’s not conflicting with any high traffic activities,” Langford said, also adding that he has added a server on the network that only will be handling the elections.
Students can vote beginning after Chapel on Wednesday until 9 p.m. Friday. Langford said students should see a section on my.ACU for the election on the left side of their Internet browser once they log in.
Because this will be the first time SA uses this system widely, Leech said the elections committee will check the results at the end of the election to make sure the system worked properly, but otherwise, he should know immediately who won the election.
