Two referenda nullified by Associated Students of Madison in Spring 2006 due to botched electronic voting will be back on the voting ballots next month.
The passed referendum lobbying for a living wage of $10.26 for all of the university's limited term employees, headed by UW-Madison's Student Labor Action Coalition, and the failed referendum striving for student support of Memorial Union and Union South renovations are being re-campaigned by their respective student groups this fall.
""We're looking to improve on the efficiency of the paper-ballot process,"" said ASM Student Elections Commission Chair and UW-Madison junior Leah Moe. ""We're going to use Scantrons instead of having to manually count everything to ensure the integrity of the process.""
Student-voter turnout dropped to 3 percent in April when ASM turned to paper ballots after two failed voting attempts using Department of Information Technology software. Moe said ASM hopes the referenda will motivate upperclassmen to vote, considering only freshman candidates run for ASM in the fall.
""It helped last year,"" she said. ""We set records in the first election with the referenda, so we're hoping to see that kind of turnout again.""
ASM Chair and UW-Madison senior Dylan Rath agreed.
""There will probably be a higher than average turnout for fall, since there aren't that many candidate elections in the fall, but not huge,"" he said.
Moe also said the ASM voting process is a unique one that requires a lengthy contracting process to make it a virtually flawless system.
""Not many companies in the U.S. even do an electronic voting system,"" Moe said. ""We've got such a strange way of voting with the plurality, like how a person has to vote for seven people in L&S, rather than just one. So we're having someone tailor-make software for us. We can't just go out and buy election software.""
Moe said ASM hopes to keep working with companies to have electronic voting back by Spring 2007.
