Over 1100 Fairfield students flooded the campus center to vote for their student representatives in Tuesday’s FUSA election. In recent years, FUSA has investigated the possibility of conducting the election on Stagweb.
“We haven’t abandoned the idea of electronic elections. However we’ve determined that Stagweb elections have inherent flaws,” said FUSA President Kevin Neubauer.
These flaws affect election results substantially.
“We conducted the fall election on Stagweb in 2002. Generally, candidates would go door-to-door reminding people to vote, and the voters would just vote for whomever got to them first on Election Day. It wasn’t fair,” explained Neubauer.
Students tend to agree.
“If it was on Stagweb, I don’t know that I’d remember to vote,” said Jaclyn Galda ’07. “When it’s [in the campus center] it’s an obvious reminder.”
Virginia Chaves ’05, an election volunteer, said, “I think it should be in the campus center, because a lot of people don’t check Stagweb and don’t know to vote,
Terrence Rusch ’07 disagreed. “I think the Stagweb elections would be better because we could choose our own time to vote. I’m here voting now, but I’m going to be late for class because of voting.”
While the idea of internet-based elections has been all but scrapped, electronic voting machines in a central location seem to be a real possibility.
“We’re investigating the possibility of getting touch-screens or an equivalent voting mechanism for our elections. They’d save time and would make the tallying process quicker and more accurate,” said Neubauer.
Student reaction to the prospect was mixed.
As she was exiting the traditional voting machine on Tuesday, Mary Boehmer ’06 said, “I think they should definitely [switch to electronic machines].”
“I wouldn’t really care,” said Amanda Chamberlain ’06 after she voted.
“This is easy enough. I mean, we’re college students,” said Anthony Gadalata ’07. “Voting doesn’t need to be any ‘cooler.'”
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