Tuesday, April 8, 2003

Online Voting Increases Participation in Student Elections, Colleges Find By SCOTT CARLSON Brian D. Namey is invested in the American democratic process, but he is well aware that most of his peers aren't. Mr. Namey, the student-body president at Carnegie Mellon University, had seen too many elections in which only a tiny fraction of the student population voted. He felt that he should either get more students out to the polls, or get the polls out to the students. Last year, he helped set up an online-voting system for student-government elections at the university, with the hope that it would help more students cast votes. Starting with its trial run last spring, voter turnout went up. Before online elections, anywhere from 2 to 7 percent of the student body typically voted; last spring, 25 percent of the students cast ballots -- or, rather, clicked buttons. "That's still low, as far as turnout goes," says Mr. Namey, a senior majoring in ethics history and public policy who aspires to a career in politics. He hopes that participation will go up even more in the next election, this spring. "This year, we are going to send mail to students saying, 'Click this link.'" Other institutions have put student elections online and are also seeing voting rates increase. At Clemson University, nearly 5,000 votes were cast for student-body president in this year's election, which was entirely online, compared with 3,500 last year, when students could vote either online or on paper. At Emory University, vote totals went from 715 to more than 2,300 after online voting began. At West Virginia University, only one student ran for president this year, but online voting actually increased the turnout slightly, from about 2,800 to 3,100. Many of the online voting systems are homegrown Web pages, sometimes run on the same systems that allow students to look up their grades, class schedules, and financial-aid information. Carole Hughes, the associate dean of student development at Boston College, says that votes in this year's online student-government election were close to 4,000, up from 1,500 under a paper-ballot system used last year. "It saves a tremendous amount of labor," she says, adding that student candidates were notified of the results by e-mail within an hour of the polls' closing. "Every time you put up public voting locations and you have hand-counted ballots, there's always some issue and some question about the results." The college's online-voting system was the students' idea. "They really felt that it would increase turnout," Ms. Hughes says. "I think they just saw that the technology was available, and this is definitely how they want to work -- with everything." Online voting at Carnegie Mellon altered Mr. Namey's campaign last spring in some unexpected and ultimately positive ways. In the end, the student body was the real winner, he says. When few students voted, he says, he could sweep an election by going to a few major student organizations -- "the college equivalent of special interests," he says -- and getting pledges of support. "But the more people vote, the more uninformed voters are going to be in the system, and it was our challenge to educate the voters," he says. After running hard against four other candidates, Mr. Namey won the presidency with 52 percent of the vote. "I really had to pound the pavement," he says. "The possibility of being removed from office contributes to a better campaign." Background articles from The Chronicle: U. of Alabama Scraps Results of Campus Election in Wake of Apparent Online Fraud (3/24/2003) U. of Oklahoma Students Vote in First Online Campus Election (5/4/2001) Student Elections at Haverford College Attract a Big Turnout Online (2/18/2000) University Moves Student Elections to Computer System (10/26/1994) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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