Rachel Thomason | Executive Director

3/22/02

On March 27, 2002, RU students will be voting for their SGA representatives online.  "We are really excited about having in-house elections this year," said Legislative VP Todd Harkrader.  "Online voting makes the election simpler and able to reach more students." Last year, SGA used an online voting system called Elexterts, built by DC Stinnett and Associates, a company from Tennessee.  The SGA was charged a base fee for the program and an additional amount per voter.  Each student also had to look up a randomly generated password to vote.

This year's process is much easier thanks to Ed Oakes, RU's Director of Academic Computing.  Oakes aquired an online voting program from the University of San Diego, and modified it to work at RU.  "The whole implementation process took about 20 hours," said Oakes, "but the script is much better [than last years']."

The election script is built with PHP, a widely used scripting language that can be embedded into HTML.  RU students will login online and use their Webmail username and password.  Special considerations have been taken to insure the security of this script. Users can only vote once, and only for elections in their class level and major.  Students vote for college representatives depending on their listed major.  "One change this year," Oakes said, "is that if you are listed as a double major, you can vote in both college representative elections.  The script will only give you access to the positions you are authorized to vote for." Once the election has started, no changes can be made to the ballots.  The election results are stored in a MySQL database and SGA will only have access to the vote count.  All name and account information is stored in a separate table.

One caution to students:  You can view the ballots without voting by clicking on a cancel button.  If you submit your results without choosing a candidate, however, you will not be allowed to vote again.  This was done because "there may be an office where you don't want to vote for anyone," said Oakes and Harkrader.

The polls will open at noon on March 27, 2002, and will close at the same time the following day, giving you 24 hours to vote.  Links to this "virtual voting booth" can be found on the SGA website, the Webmail website, and in a campus-wide email that will be sent before the election.  See you online!

Click here for information about the presidential candidates.