In an effort to increase voter turnout in FUSA elections, Student Body President Karen Donoghue, ’03, put in a push for the elections to be held online via Fairfield’s Campus Pipeline service.
Due to complications, however, students must make their way this year to the lobby of the Barone Campus Center to vote.
The issue of online voting has been brought to attention just days before the student body will hear from the four official FUSA presidential candidates who are set to debate today at 12:00 p.m. in the campus center. Students will then go to the polls on Tuesday, Feb. 18 for the primary elections to narrow the candidates down to two. The actual elections for FUSA president will take place on Tuesday, Feb. 25 in the Campus Center.
“We wanted online voting to occur for this year,” said Donoghue. “We were hoping to make the elections cheaper, easier and to increase the numbers of the people who will hopefully vote.”
Back in the fall, the freshman class elections took place on Campus Pipeline. However, the elections did not go off without a hitch.
“The first problem that arose came in the amount of people we could fit on one screen,” Donoghue said. “We could only fit five people’s names on one screen, so if six people were running for a position, students would have to click to another screen and that would be frustrating.”
Dean of Students, Mark Reed, specified the problems.
“When this was done for the freshman senate elections in the fall, it was done through a basic surveying feature currently available within Campus Pipeline itself,” said Reed. “In some ways, we knew that the basic built in tool within Campus Pipeline currently was limited, but since the application’s administrator indicated he could “tweak” it to work for the freshmen elections, the Office of Student Activities and FUSA decided to go ahead with it.”
Donoghue also noted that the elections were scheduled to begin at 8:00 a.m. but began 20 minutes late. Some students had reactions to voting online. “I would love to be able to vote online because it would save me a lot of time,” said Nicole Blyth, ’05. “Voting in those booths also makes me a little bit claustrophobic.”
“I think that it would make a lot more people vote if it were online,” said Matt Molinari, ’04. “But I also think that it will lower the work ethic of the candidates because they won’t be outside the Campus Center before we go in to vote.”
“We are very appreciative of Campus Pipeline trying to do this,” Donoghue said. “But it just doesn’t look like it can happen this year.”
The plans for online voting began back in November and not enough time was given to allow for it to occur.
“Generally speaking, [the fall elections on Pipeline] worked fairly well,” said Reed. “We were hopeful that it could be tweaked for the general elections, but given the amount of candidates for a variety of positions… the office of Student Activities and FUSA felt it better to continue with standard voting machines.”
Donoghue noted that plans were in the making to look towards an outside company to tally the votes. “We looked to a company called Zoomorang who specializes in these types of things,” Donoghue said. “It would have cost a set fee of $2,000 and we would have it forever.”
“We just felt that so much money had been put into Campus Pipeline that we should expand upon that for next year,” Donoghue added.
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