E-voting fail
I can haz functional online elections?
BACK IN THE heady days of February 2009, the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa (SFUO) introduced online voting (or e-voting) for their elections. Naturally, there were a few kinks, but all was forgiven seeing as it was the first year the system had been used and e-voting played a role in setting a record-high voter turnout of 27.2 per cent.
When Round Two came around in 2010 it was reasonable to expect that many of the problems would get worked out. Unfortunately, most of them weren’t.
Take, for example, what should be the simplest part of e-voting: sending students their unique PINs, so that they can vote. While I received mine for the first day in plenty of time, I know many people that didn’t get theirs until well into the evening. In fact, as I followed various blogs that were covering the SFUO elections, it seemed that many students didn’t get their PIN until well after polls had closed for the night—forcing them to wait for the second day before they could vote.
That, of course, leads into the second big problem the e-voting system had: it closed for the night, a fact I discovered when I attempted to vote at 11 p.m. on the first day of elections. At first, I could hardly believe it. Who has ever heard of a website closing for the night? Imagine if Amazon.com or eBay were to completely shut down every evening (and early on Sunday). It wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever.
According to the SFUO elections office, shutting voting down was ostensibly so that candidates couldn’t “unfairly” influence students to vote for them in the later hours of the evening. But hold on; by that logic, the polls should never open. Are candidates not free to campaign to students wherever and whenever they want during the election period? Not only this, but it assumes a very low level of responsibility for the student body as a whole. Surely those of us that care about student politics are better than this? Voting should be available 24 hours a day—there’s no good reason for it not to be.
And really, there’s no good reason for problems with PINs and voting hours to exist. Combine both with a poorly designed SFUO elections website, making it hard to find further information about what was going on with the e-voting system, and you have a bit of a mess. Voter turnout certainly reflected the issues, as it tumbled to 21.88 per cent this year.
Ultimately, the SFUO needs to take a good, hard look at e-voting for next year. It’s certainly not without merit, and I believe it probably is the most logical way to run a student election, but it needs to be done well. If, on the other hand, it continues to be plagued with these and other problems, voter turnout will only keep declining.
The Board discussed the closure of the polls during the overnight period and was of the opinion that students are sheep and could be influenced with booze to vote for unscrupulous candidates. It seems that your student leaders lack faith in the decision making ability of the students that elected them. I definitely was in favor of 24h polls.
Yeah Ebay should totally shut down at night so no one makes any drunken purchases. Maybe credit card companies should freeze accounts at night in case their customers are drunk and their friends pressure them to spend...
"Are candidates not free to campaign to students wherever and whenever they want during the election period?"
No, candidates are not allowed to campaign off-campus.
Nor are candidates allowed to throw 'parties' in order to campaign
Because of this, the sheep are not allowed to practice their democratic duty at night.
I completely agree with David McClelland's article. There were transition reports produced after last year's SFUO elections and apparently, from what I heard, they were quite detailed in nature. So, why then did very similar problems occur this year if these reports supposedly stated the mistakes made in the previous year. Also, David is right to say that there is absolutely no one who could give a logical answer as to why the e-voting process would be shut down between certain hours. Do they not realize that this is when most students, after a long day of class or work, take the time to actually check their emails? When faced with a shut down of the e-voting system, students easily forget about having to vote the next day and the next thing you know, the end of the third voting day comes along and they didn't get a chance to vote.