The student senate election, conducted via the internet on Friday, Sept. 22 was, according to Election Supervisor and College senior Peter Collopy, a success. This smoothness stands in contrast to some previous years, such as the 2005 spring election, which was complicated by flaws in the computer voting system and an incomplete senate constitution.

According to Student Senator Collopy, there was only one technical glitch reported this year:

“There was one person who was unable to vote because of a technical problem, but I was able to fix that after she gave me that information.”

In the 2005 spring election, there was a tie between two candidates running for the final seat. With no provisions in the senate constitution about how to deal with this scenario, the Student Senate Election Task Force had to use their own judgment in deciding how to choose a winner. They ultimately decided to hold a runoff election, a decision that was not without some controversy due to its lack of a historical or legal mandate.

Election managers also encountered technical difficulties when they sent an e-mail containing a link to the senate ballot to the student body. Each link sent the students to a slightly different URL and was labeled spam by the students’ e-mail systems. It was often instinctively deleted, raising concerns that it limited student access in a way that compromised the integrity of the election.

Those flaws have been eliminated this year, however, at least for the time being, due to changes in the way the election management uses the Internet. Instead of using a professional computer program to send e-mails to the entire student body, the e-mails were sent to each student by Collopy himself. All e-mails with links to the senate ballot were sent to the students by Collopy during this election.

“This new system sends e-mails to a normal e-mail program,” said Collopy. “Also, it identifies people by their T number and their OCMR number.” Hopefully, this will further limit the odds of mistakes occurring.

While there have been no apparent problems this election, Collopy’s system has Internet documentation of each student’s vote to refer to in the case of a problem.

“If someone alleged there were irregularities, I could go through the voting record,” he said.

This system has been in use since after the spring 2005 election and has resulted in no flaws comparable to those in the prior election.

There were a few minor differences between the execution of this election and the execution of the election in the spring of 2006. For example, there were only 762 valid votes this election, while there were 963 votes in the previous election. While 762 surpasses the minimal number of votes needed for the election to be considered legitimate (at least twenty percent of the student body must vote) it is still a relatively low amount considering Oberlin’s population of roughly 3000 students.

 Another change in this election was the total elimination of the paper ballot due to its lack of usage. According to Collopy, only 20 to 30 people used a paper ballot last year. This election is the first time that the Internet has been used as the sole means of voting at Oberlin.