Roughly 2% turn out for Tuesday's AS election

By Jack Gillum

Students voted Tuesday to eliminate class officer positions and rewrite two vice presidents' job responsibilities a day after technical glitches prevented voters from casting their ballots online.

About 72 percent voted to remove class officers in the Associated Students constitution, replacing them with appointed "Class Coordinating Committee" members. On the second issue, 82 percent voted to rename and re-configure the job descriptions of the development and services VPs.

But only 74 out of roughly 4,700 undergraduates -- about 1.6 percent -- cast ballots in an election that was supposed to run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday.

The election was postponed Monday morning after access was denied to SurveyMonkey.com, a Web site that was to host both this election and the general election April 27.

With the changes, the new Committee will consist of one student from each class and will report to the vice president of student involvement, instead of elected class officers. The current services vice president will focus more on incoming freshmen involvement and new services, such as dogears.net.

By 11 a.m. Tuesday, elections officials switched to traditional paper ballots when the site failed again for a second day.

Center for Student Leadership Director Jonathan Gray announced in an e-mail Tuesday morning that the Web service "has not worked to the standard required by ASSCU."

Accessing the site Monday and Tuesday morning produced errors that either the survey was closed, or that it was available between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. -- even though the site was accessed at about 9:20 a.m.

Students who already voted online had to return and cast a paper ballot, Gray said.

SurveyMonkey.com founder Ryan Finley said in a telephone interview last week that he didn't recommend his service for elections, even though about 30 other universities use such a service. "We're called SurveyMonkey, not VoteMonkey," he said.

Jasper Seldin, the senate facilities and operations committee chair, said that he was never aware of what specific service would have been used.

Seldin said he would be "disturbed" if the online method was used in the general AS election, which includes president and vice-president votes, on April 27. "It opens up the possibility of fraud," he said.

Elections Chair Audrey Wede referred questions about the use of online voting for the next election to AS advisor Timothy Haskell, who was out of town and unavailable for comment Wednesday.

Wede told The Santa Clara last week that such a survey site, however, could still be appropriate for a student election.

* Contact Jack Gillum at (408) 554-4849 or jgillum@scu.edu.