Editor’s note: Student Senate reporter Nicole Strittmater did not participate in this editorial board
According to an article in the April 17 issue of The Spectator, there was a vast array of questionable elements in last week’s student body elections. The final election results, which came in seven and a half hours later than originally expected, had Tim Lauer and Meghan Charlier winning the election 1,201 votes to Emily Mattheisen and Caroline Wee’s 1,177, a margin of only 24. But the problems facing the university’s first online election were staggering, the severity of which are grounds for a re-vote.
The campaign was flawed in the very early going. During the debate between the two tickets on April 13, current Student Body President Ray French was the moderator. This had a plain conflict of interest as Charlier is the current vice president for French, the first in a list of discrepancies in how this election was run. French was also one of the two people monitoring the vote count. This is not to say French manipulated the vote in any way, but the mere fact that this was how the election was run opens the door for possible distortions of vote counts in the future. An outside party of some sort should have been used to moderate the debate as well as monitor the election results. A sitting student body president should not be allowed to monitor the results of an election his or her sitting vice president is running in.
Another egregious practice that took place in this election was the soliciting of votes on the campus mall. Some candidates had computers set up and brought passing students over to vote, giving them campaign paraphernalia and standing over them as they entered their votes. If this were to happen in a national election where a presidential candidate stood over people as they entered their votes, there would be a tremendous outcry. This practice is not acceptable on any level in a democracy.
Even ignoring the systemic malpractices that plagued this election, there is much in the online voting system that brings the validity of the results into question. The WebSurvey system, which allowed students to vote in a link sent via e-mail, worked very poorly after a successful run in a February referendum question election. The system went through periods when it would not let anyone log in to vote and when it did work, it allowed non-student members of the university to vote. In an election that turned out this close, who is to say what these glitches did to affect the final outcome?
But while the WebSurvey system had some major flaws this time around, that isn’t to say fixing those would make the election any more credible. With online voting, there is uncertainty of whether the username casting the vote is actually the owner of that username. People could log under another username and vote in addition to their individual vote, violating the idea of proper representation from the student body. Paper and poll ballots prevents this potential problem, forcing the actual voters to go to the Davies Center and physically cast their ballots. Certainly this would reduce the turnout for the election, but it would prevent any potential voter fraud; additionally, it would force students who want to vote to actually make the effort to be informed and make their way to Davies, leading it to be more of an election and less of a popularity contest.
UW-Eau Claire students should not sit back and quietly let this go away. The student government can help shape campus policy, affecting every student enrolled here. Our student body was not properly represented in a variety of ways in this election and there should be uproar against how it was run. The members of Student Senate should consider all that went wrong in this election in the future, specifically in the do-over this election needs.
