**I wrote this before the updated version of the results was posted on the website. Some numbers have changed slightly, but I am still using the 8201 number that is highly advertised.**
I know I said I was done with this particular blog, but I just wanted to share some thoughts, and push my post total to 30.
A LOT of praise has been given to e-voting, and why not. Never before has our voter turnout been so high. Never before has it been so easy to vote, I mean, you could have voted from anywhere in the world. I am not condemning e-voting, but I do have a point to raise.
According to the official turnout numbers, we had 8201 students vote. But not one race or question received nearly that amount.
Here's what I mean: (all statistics come from the attachment on the iwillvote.ca page)
President: Votes cast: 7565 ---->Difference: 636 ----------> Winning Margin: 442
VP Social: Votes cast: 6777 ----->Difference: 1424 --------> Winning Margin: 657
VP UA: Votes cast: 6744 ------->Difference: 1457 --------> Winning Margin: 265
VP Finance: Votes Cast: 6783 -->Difference: 1418 --------> Winning Margin: 1261
BoG: Votes Cast: 6470---------->Difference: 1731--------> Winning Margin: 764
I will stop there. The highest amount of votes for any of the races was for Smoke Free Campus at 7673.
I understand that people may choose to not vote in a particular race, but those are some pretty big numbers. For the VP UA, it's 17.7%.
I am not officially challenging the results, as I am pretty sure I have no place doing so. I only put the margins of victory to highlight how close some of these races were.
If we were using the good ole fashioned paper ballots, we could actually look and see either spoiled ballots or blank ones. Even if we could be shown the "receipts" for the e-votes, I still would not be satisfied, since it really doesn't prove much, since it could have been a transmission error while voting, or perhaps the person tried to select a candidate but accidently didn't.
I for one am not ready to jump on the e-voting bandwagon just yet. Bring back the paper!
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Ken,
ReplyDeleteExcellent post. However, you are under-estimating a few factors.
We have more candidates, more races and... more voters... than ever before. At the same time, we are still living in the 1999 bubble of having a 1-2 week campaign (in our case, 10 days).
It is impossible to expect students to know all 70+ candidates and choices they have in front of them. Some might take their time and vote on each and every race. Others will simply decide to skip one category.
You also forget to mention the fact that we encouraged students to vote... And if they were unsure... They could vote blank. It was in the first email sent out to all students.
Ask around you and you will be surprised to see how many students had no idea who was running for certain positions and decided to vote blank. Or the amount of students that decided to vote blank out of protest. And so on.
We debated putting "None of the above" on the ballot, though many people were against this idea. We also debated having write-ins, again, many people were against this.
Paper is not a perfect system. It has benefits, but take the CFS referendum: Students who wrote:"FUCK CFS" on their ballot (while voting NO), saw their ballot rejected and not counted. Did they know this would happen before voting? Take the situation in Minnesota, where some voters scratched one candidate, then drew an X over it and scratched another candidate. Those votes are still being contested.
Instead of using the blanks as a condemnation of e-voting, you should interpret the blanks as what they are: Someone that took the time and effort to vote, but was still not inspired/informed enough to click on a candidate in particular.
The next question is: What can we do to have less blanks in the next election?
Here are a few suggestions:
1 - Longer campaign period.
2 - Longer voting period.
3 - Having "None of the above" on the ballot.
4 - Having write-ins on the ballot.
Also, you can not dismiss a blank ballot as not being a "cast ballot".
ReplyDeleteSomeone that decides to "blank vote" is still voting. So it is inaccurate to state: "According to the official turnout numbers, we had 8201 students vote. But not one race or question received nearly that amount."
They all received that amount.
My concern is not with the fact that we have blank ballots, they exist, and we deal with them. My concern is with the sheer amount of them, in some races around 17%.
ReplyDeleteIf we were using a paper ballot method, we could produce 1801 original paper ballots with the clearly blank vote, however, this is impossible with the online method, and that is what scares me. Since we cannot guarentee that each vote that was intended was actually made. Now you may say that if someone did not vote properly it is there own fault, since the ballot was in fact easy to follow. However, if we were using the paper ballot, it would not even be an issue, since we all know how to vote that way.
And I sincerly hope that the CFS referendum would not have been a different result if all the clearly NO votes that were rejected because of a derogatory slogan written on it, since each rejected vote should be up for debate.
Ken,
ReplyDeleteThere are less blank ballots on referendums than there are on VP University Affairs. The referendum questions came after the VPUA vote.
There was much less hype on VPUA than there was on President, for instance. VPUA had four quality candidates, but no drama or controversy or ideological divide. Students who were unsure who to vote for might have simply decided not to vote at all.
If this was the first or last question, I might agree with you. But the fact that this was on the middle of the ballot, had four candidates, little media attention... I simply can not understand how you can argue people did not know how to vote. Rather, people did not feel passionately about this race.
Let's take Paper Ballot for one minute. The advantage of e-voting was the ability to have the platforms. Imagine for one minute 80+ candidates running, without any more information on the ballot. You would be asking people to vote randomly for more than half the races, unless you attached all the platforms to the ballot. And then what? You'd have 20-30 minute line-ups. And then what? People would stop waiting. And move on.
Let us be rational. We encouraged students to vote blank if they were unsure who to vote for. We had 80+ candidates. We had people who were voting for the first time. We had more than double the amount of students that voted last year. Not everyone knows what UA does. Not everyone cares about every position. Not everyone cares about the SFUO or the U of O.
What does 17% mean? Well, while you try answering that, I will simple attempt to say one thing:
Last year, 88% of students did not vote. I can not, no matter what you claim, think that is legitimate. Paper or not, when 88% of your membership does not vote, there is a serious problem.
Now come back to this year. 73% of students did not vote. Is that legitimate? No. Is it more legitimate than last year? Yes.
So while you focus on 17% - for one race - I will focus on the 73% and try to make that number smaller next year, and the year after that.
Paper is a thing of the past.