E-mail voting revolutionizes graduate-student elections

Published: Thursday, February 29, 1996

By Ryan Ozimek

Daily Bruin Contributor

Hoping to increase voter turnout while also spending less of an already small budget, the Graduate Students Association (GSA) will make use of e-mail and the World Wide Web for this year's general election.

Mass e-mail distribution to graduate students with university registered e-mail accounts will begin on or around April 15, and ballots will need to be returned on April 30.

Each of these graduate students will receive two separate e-mails. The first will give a brief description of each of the candidate's platforms along with details on any amendments to the association's constitution.

Graduate students who don't have access to on-campus e-mail accounts will still be able to cast their ballots. The registrar's office is creating a World Wide Web page to allow students to connect to a page containing the same information available through e-mail.

One of the primary concerns with these new voting techniques was isolating voting constituents without e-mail accounts. As internal Vice President Kevin Welner said, "It's a good idea as long as those who don't have e-mail still have the opportunity to vote."

For now, at least, students can continue voting by paper and pencil if they do not have e-mail access by going to the graduate government office. But officials said that they created the electronic balloting as a way to make a more user-friendly general election.

With a voter turnout of 8 percent during last year's general election and 9 percent the year before, the association needed something to increase graduate student participation.

"(The association) needs a 10 percent voter turnout in order to pass constitutional amendments which include increasing GSA membership fees to run the central office," said Katherine Crosswhite, commissioner of elections.

With less than 10 percent of the graduate student body voting in the past few years of elections, the government's budget has remained mostly static during that time. Even though student fee increases have passed overwhelming in past elections, no formal action has taken place to increase the budget because of the lack of votes.

"I look at the new process as being positive and hopefully increasing voter participation to the critical 10 percent mark," said association President John Shapley.

In the past, graduate students voted at stations placed throughout the campus just like undergraduates. But because graduate students are not on campus as much, the success of graduate voting booths has historically been much less than undergraduate booths. And the high cost of maintaining an ineffective voting booth has become increasingly expensive for the financially strapped institution.

Trying to extend deeper into the pool of graduate students, the association began sending out mail ballots to listed students. But voter turnout remained very low, while postage and paper costs were high.

"The mail ballot process asked a lot of the students to go through the whole process of voting and opened up more chances for problems," Crosswhite said.

With an electronic general election, the graduate government hopes to increase voter turnout by giving the students an election process that is quick and easy.

After checking their e-mail, a student would need simply to identify themselves using their student identification number and possibly the last four digits of their social security number, answer a few questions, and then hit the reply button.

"Katherine has to be credited for moving the GSA election process into the 21st century," Shapley said.

The process of collecting and counting the electronic ballots has ben taken up by the university registrar's office. Using a program that will allow their computers to be text-sensitive to the sender's response, the registrar's office will be able to quickly and accurately count ballots.

A prominent concern among many students and association members is the possibility of fraud that could come in an all-electric election. According to Crosswhite, transmission of identification over the network seemed rather safe, but identification of senders may be a slightly tougher problem to overcome.

Officials explained that computer security measures will automatically delete any repeat ballots and will keep the original ballot.

Students who believe that someone may have tampered with their e-mail ballot can go to the association office in Kerckhoff Hall and vote in person, which will take precedence over any electronic vote that someone may have made using their e-mail account.

"I think that we have created a system that will work without many problems," Crosswhite predicted.Comments to webmaster@db.asucla.ucla.edu