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  CHRIS BACKLEY Evan Okamura, who is running for USAC external vice president, speaks with fourth-year history student Emily Peterson Wednesday.

By Sarah Lazur

Daily Bruin Contributor

Voting for the external vice president of the Undergraduate Students Association Council will take place today and Friday.

This is the first time elections will be held online at UCLA.

Election Board New advisor Mike Cohn believes an online election is best for filling the EVP vacancy because of its financial advantage. Holding the election online will cost approximately $150, rather than the $10,000 required for a paper ballot election.

“I’m excited that it’s another very cost-effective opportunity, and I am extremely confident that it is a secure system and it will be effective,” Cohn said.

Candidates for EVP – who serves as a liaison between USAC and off-campus groups – are Evan Okamura, a third-year political science and Asian American Studies student; and Susan M. Sheybani, a fifth-year political science transfer student.

The online election will take place from noon today until noon Friday. Students can vote by logging onto their My.UCLA Web page at any time during the voting period.

Since Wednesday, candidate statements were available online on a link from students’ personal My.UCLA pages. During the voting period, students can access the ballot from a link on the page.

No computer glitches should arise, according to Cohn, and the online voting process will be accurate. The server should be able to handle the influx of users during the voting period, he said.

“It was a smart move considering the time frame,” Cohn said. “It’s very secure and My.UCLA can accommodate every student who will desire to vote so there shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

This election will test the online voting process, said E-Board Chair Alex Kaplan.

“There’s a lot of questions that can only be answered by trying it out,” Kaplan said. “UCSD has online elections and it gives them high voter turnout.”

But Kaplan doesn’t expect an especially high voter turnout because online voting is a new concept at UCLA and the election came with short notice and little publicity.

Despite the advantages of online voting, Cohn says there’s no guarantee it will take the place of traditional elections.

“This is a perfect opportunity to take advantage of some of the technology we have here on campus,” he said. “This is a trial basis for the special election.”

Not all council members shared Cohn’s and Kaplan’s enthusiasm. Internal Vice President Elias Enciso and Financial Supports Commissioner Cynthia Rabuy voted against approving the online election calendar and campaign budgets at last week’s USAC meeting.

Both Enciso and Rabuy said the council’s decision to allow students to vote from off-campus computers presents serious problems.

“I was really concerned about people who were really apathetic or just didn’t care about the EVP position and were only going to go vote because their friends told them to,” Enciso said, adding that candidates could have parties where they pressure students to vote for them.

Kaplan disagreed that peer pressure would affect the outcome any more than in a traditional election and cited the five-minute delay between votes from the same computer as a deterrent to mass voting.

“I wouldn’t say that in this fashion it’s more of a concern than during the old system,” Kaplan said. “Under the old system there’s nothing stopping you from having a ‘vote for my friend’ party.”

The online election would have been appropriate, Rabuy said, had USAC restricted voting to on-campus computers as in the council’s original plan.

“Ideally we would have been able to vote from certain parts of campus and that’s it,” she said. “It wasn’t the actual election that I was against, it was that there was a better way to do it.”

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