Recent Students’ Association government elections showed great improvements over past elections, but some progress could be made.
Candidates should be praised for making competitive campaigns – all but one election had opposition – that drew a record number of voters.
Online elections, conveniently linked at the login page for UR WebMail and the SA Web site, accounted for all but 11 of the ballots cast. This system has been greatly increasing the efficiency of the election process, working better than in past years.
Also, the Elections Committee swiftly resolved minor issues, such as illegally placed posters and ballot casting issues.
However, there are some drawbacks to the election plan. The SA presidential race results were not released, due to technological issues. The online voting system was not properly coded to display a plurality vote, but rather to reflect the majority vote system from last year. Tests should have been run in order to confirm that the system could successfully display results when returns came in on election night.
Such a test could have averted the problem of incorrect and incomplete information being displayed when the elections’ Web site was accessed Wednesday night.
Instead of storing the results on an Information Technology Services server, inaccessible to the Elections Committee, efforts should have been made to ensure that they would be displayed for public viewing.
Although there was communication between ITS and Elections Committee members, this issue should have been addressed prior to the final night of elections.
Furthermore, considering that there were problems in the past, ITS administrators should have made themselves available on the last night of elections to resolve the issues that came up.
While the SA government elections have been steadily increasing in efficiency and quality, policies governing the distribution of results should continually be evaluated and implemented in future elections.
