Armed with an improved online voting system, Associated Students of Madison will hold elections from Tuesday until Thursday to fill positions for the 2007-'08 school year.
Technical errors in UW-Madison's Division of Information Technology system resulted in botched elections last spring—a higher than expected student voter turnout of about 15 percent of the student body overwhelmed the online voting technology.
Votes were recalled twice and a paper ballot system was established after the errors occurred. However, only about 3 percent of UW-Madison students voted in the paper ballot election.
After the new system was tested, ASM Chair Dylan Rath said he thought it was ""very secure"" and would hopefully guarantee a glitch-free election.
Students can begin voting Tuesday for candidates representing different schools within UW-Madison. Each school has a certain number of seats allocated to it in the Student Council. There are also seats open in the Student Services Finance Committee, as well as senior class officer positions.
Also on the ballot is a referendum that runs every other year to opt into the United Council, a council consisting of colleges and universities across the state. According to Student Council Vice Chair Gestina Sewell. the council works on ""different campaigns that the students see as important issues.""
""After the 33 people are elected to Student Council from all the different schools ... they nominate people within those elected positions to be the chair, vice chair, finance chair,"" Rath said.
Polly Pfeiffer, commissioner of the Student Elections Commission, said that the SEC's role is to advertise the elections and get people interested in voting.
SEC Chair Leah Moe said she thought the convenience of voting online would contribute to a higher turnout.
""As we saw in the fall, no matter how efficient our paper ballot system is, it still doesn't draw the number of students as an online system does,"" Moe said.
ASM's fall 2006 elections saw a 6.6 percent student voter turnout, with two controversial referenda concerning the student living wage and Wisconsin Union renovations on the ballot.
Moe said ASM is now working with the UW Survey Center to maintain the online voting system.
She added that despite the problem last spring, DoIT helped ASM put together a proposal to find new clients ASM could work with.
Students can vote at asm.uwsc.wisc.edu/spring2007 with a MyUW login starting at 8 a.m. Tuesday until 8 p.m. Thursday.
