Come next year, voting in student elections could be just one click away. U of T hopes to launch a website in the spring to allow student clubs and societies to hold their elections online. Students will be able to see current and upcoming elections they can vote in, as well as past election results.
“We had a number of student societies coming to us asking for the ability to do some online elections,” said Jim Delaney, director of the Office of the Vice-Provost, Students. “We did some testing with a few student societies and we decided we needed to do a bit more development.”
In 2008, the Student Life office partnered with Student Information Systems, which runs ROSI, to develop the site.
Delaney said that a primary consideration is maintaining the integrity of the election process.
For the Woodsworth College Student Association, which tested the system with its past two elections, moving online has resulted in more students voting.
“Previously it had been only paper ballots. That obviously restricted the number of people who chose to become involved because they may not physically be at the college,” said Liza Nassim, dean of students and a former elections officer for WCSA. “Given the online option, students can vote from wherever they are.”
Voting online resolves the privacy concern of providing names and student numbers at polling stations. It also removes the need to have provisions in place to ensure people don’t vote twice.
“We generally have relatively low voter turnout, but I would say [voting] went up 50 per cent,” said Nassim. “There was really no downside, it was just fantastic.”
Online voting doesn’t have unanimous approval. Andreas Kloppenburg, a member of the UC Literary and Athletic Society, ran for UTSU last year on the Change ticket. “Personally, I think paper ballots are the best,” Kloppenburg said. “It [online voting] is a complicated system […] you can’t really get the volume of votes you can get with paper ballots.”
Voting.utoronto.ca is already up, but there are no elections currently listed.
