Students’ Association passed a new bill that will fund an online voting initiative.

SA president Dylan Benac, senior political science major from Boerne, said online voting has been brought before Congress before but never proved successful.

In 2004 Congress voted against an online voting site. A few years ago SA tried a voting app that did not work.

“We believe this new website will be more efficient than the previous models,” Benac said.

SA worked with The Association for Computing Machinery to create the voting website. Students will be able to go to www.vote.acu.edu to vote for new SA officers, homecoming queen, Mr. and Miss ACU and other campus-wide elections, according to the bill. Log-in will be the students regular user name and password. From there students will see pictures of the different candidates they can vote for. After the elections are over, the results will be calculated on an excel worksheet to determine the winner of the election.The entire project cost $300.

Kaitlyn Tui, sophomore international studies major from Washington, D.C., said she thinks the online initiative will ease the stress of voting.

“You used to have to wait 10 minutes before you could cast your vote the old way, because of the process,” Tui said. “Now students can vote three minutes before their class starts. Simple.”

Tui said the website will be easier than a mobile app because students will be able to see the voting requirements easier.

“We are more likely to finish something on our laptop than on our phone,” Tui said. “I believe this new way of voting will help turn out more voters.”

The bill to fund the online voting initiative was passed unanimously by Congress.