By
The Wildcat Opinions Board
Just when you thought the Internet was only for pirating music, instant messaging the person down the hall and downloading porn, it might have a real purpose: saving trees. It works like this, each year ASUA prints out thousands of ballots for the UA electorate to choose its political leaders. And each year, thousands of those ballots go unused. Well, certainly they get recycled.
Okay, really the Internet has another purpose connected with ASUA. This spring, when the handful of us who believe voting behavior is a marker of upstanding moral character cast our votes in the ASUA elections, we will be marking virtual ballots in cyberspace. At Wednesday night's meeting ASUA election commissioner Joe Rodgers presented the senators with an updated election code proposal. The proposal outlined the protocol for UA's first online elections.
The proposal has merit in many ways - besides the aforementioned environmental perk.
First, in the words of Rodgers, "It's quicker, faster and more modern than the old elections." Who can argue with progress?
For those of you whose hands shot up in the air, your voices crying, "Me! Me! I hate urban sprawl and corporate whores!" there's another bonus - increased election turnout. Granted, the 2,000 votes cast last year were impressive, that's still only about six percent of the eligible voting population at the UA. We don't even have to register at least 30 days in advance! Why don't we vote? We are lazy.
Thus the benefit of online voting is that it anticipates this problem, and proposes a solution. As big a group of layabouts as we may be, we're never to lazy to point and click - anything. Of course, before we vote we'll need information on the candidates and the logical step is to put that online too. ASUA, the two go hand, and as long as you're already catering to our sloth....
As wonderful an idea as this, there are is the usual host of problems that remains to be addressed. Security, accuracy, and the possibility of a network crash are all concerns that the ASUA Senators conscientiously raised Wednesday night. Let us hope that these concerns were addressed before the proposal was made a reality. Hell, the Democratic Party successfully pulled off online voting right here in Arizona, they must know how to deal with these issues.
However, there is another problem that stands to undermine increased voter participation, arguably the greatest benefit of online voting. ASUA seems to be lacking what Sen. Matt Bailey calls "a contingency." He said in the Wildcat yesterday, "I am all for online voting, however since this is the first year, I recommend that you add a contingency."
Good call, Senator.
ASUA's proposal, as it stands, will not only allow for voting online, but will also eliminate all the traditional oncampus polling places. This is not good, especially for the first time out of the gate.
Not every one can or wants to vote online. Don't ask us why, the less often we have to disconnect from www.supergreg.com, the happier we are. Still, if you want more people to vote, providing them with more means to do so seems like one way to go about it. Besides, how will we get the all important pressured-into-voting-by-people-standing-in-the-path-of traffic vote?
Well, even if we don't get that vote, online voting is a good idea for UA, provided it's implemented correctly. That means letting people vote online or in the traditional polling booth.
