Last week 526 voters participated in the Student Government Association’s first attempt at a completely online voting process.
According to Jana Stewart, SGA vice president, 5,297 students were eligible to vote, and the voter turnout was at 9.93 percent. Stewart said this is pretty consistent with turnout for previous years aside from the year of the recreation center referendum.
Stewart expected an increase in voter turnout, but was still pleased with the amount of students who voted that week.
“We should be pleased,” she said. “With the amount of students who had to go and get their PIN numbers because they did not have them, that says something positive about the student body’s interest, and it says something about the excellent publicity our publicity director and our senate put out there.”
Expectations for the spring elections are high, according to Stewart. “I think students will just be online to take care of other things and they will see the link and think ‘oh, I can vote’ and they will already have their pin number.”
For this election, all votes were tabulated through the computer program set up for voting.
The Election commission vote passed with 370 students voting for and 129 students voting against.
This amendment allows for an Election Commission of five individuals, four of whom will be executive board members of the SGA and Student Programming Association, with one being approved by both the SGA and SPA jointly. According to Stewart, the Commission will administer, operate, supervise, enforce and direct all campus elections beginning with next spring.
The vote to reduce the hours required for a student on the executive board failed despite the fact that it did have the simple majority of the vote 296 for and 221 against. In order for both of these amendments to pass they had to have a total of 332 votes for the amendment.
“For an amendment to become part of our constitution it has to pass by a two-thirds vote, and it was not a two-thirds vote,” Stewart said.