Recently the Student Government Association adopted a new form of voting for candidates. The idea has been circulating for the past couple of years, but was put into place for the current elections.
Associate professor of law Steven Mulroy and Max Garzon, a professor and interim director in computer science, worked with SGA to promote the idea. They said online voting was supposed to be an alternative to physical polling.
However, for this year's election, which started Tuesday and will end Thursday at 7 p.m., online voting became the only method of choosing the candidates for SGA seats.
"The SGA was not able to get an old voting machine," Mulroy said.Mulroy said the original plan was to borrow a couple of voting machines from the Shelby County Elections Commission, but because SGA could not do so, they decided to make all polling online.
"The machines were not ordered on time," said Julia Rhodes, a senior administrative secretary in the dean of students' office.
Rhodes said the machines have to be ordered from the Shelby County Elections Commission 10 business days prior to the SGA elections.
"Instead of online voting as a choice, it became mandatory," Mulroy said.
To compensate for not having the traditional voting machines, SGA set up three booths in the lobby of The University Center, with each booth equipped with a laptop, Mulroy said.
University Center director Jay Andersen said there used to be other booth locations set up around campus, as well as The University Center, but this year the booths were set up only in The University Center because of its locality. Additionally, most of the student offices are located in The University Center.
"They're using the Center as the key flagship for voting," Andersen said. "When you look around campus, you look where you think students would most likely be."
The University Center gives more of an opportunity for people to know about online voting, Andersen said.
Additional reasons for online voting include seeing if students are able to use computers for voting and to increase the usage of the SGA Web site, Andersen said.
"Everyone wants this new technology," he said.
Andersen also said the online method made it much quicker to tabulate.
"If it works out this time, then they will put it (SGA elections) online all the time," Andersen said.
The online voting also allowed SGA to further explore each voter's background. This is a way to find out exactly what kind of students are voting and to study the reasons for low turnouts, Andersen said.
Esha Jagers, a senior criminal justice major who voted yesterday, said online voting was more efficient and trustworthy than the previous voting machines.
"It's easier and more confidence goes into the tallying of the votes," Jagers said.
The polls will close at midnight and re-open at 5 a.m. Thursday.
