“The plan is to have it for GM Week 2005,” said David Scherzer, GRAD Senator and Chair of the Rules and Elections Committee. The process of writing all of the software is still underway, but each day brings the possibility of e-voting closer to coming to fruition. Union system administrators are helping to write the software required. It is hoped that a bug-free prototype of the software will be ready by early December and tested by the Senate. If the Senate is satisfied, actions will be taken to implement e-voting in the spring.

According to Scherzer, the voting process will still be very similar to how it has been in the past. There will be two or three polling sites around campus, each with three to eight terminals. Students will present their ID for verification and put their RIN into the system. The system will then bring up a ballot. There will be a mouse to click on the candidate and vote for them, as well as a keyboard to write in candidates. Voters will click a “confirm” button and a ballot will be printed and enclosed in an envelope. This printed ballot will then be reviewed by the voter and signed when they are satisfied and kept for backup purposes. If the voter participated in the primary voting, a sticker will be placed on their ID card and they will be eligible to receive a mug.

As far as efficiency goes, Jesse Chase ’05, Independent Council senator and the chair of the Computer Affairs Committee, said that “this system will help reduce the amount of time needed.” In the past, paper ballots had to be hand counted within a period of time that was just a little bit longer than twenty-four hours. The new system will eliminate a lot of that time. “We think it will speed up the process,” Scherzer added.

Security has been one of the main issues to be dealt with. E-voting has been tried twice before at RPI for GM Week elections, lasting for short intervals in both the early 1980s and the 1990s. The systems were scrapped because of accusations of hacking.

According to Scherzer, security is at the forefront. Though voting will take place inside closed terminals, there will be supervisors watching to make sure everything runs smoothly. “You voters really need to have faith in the system,” Scherzer said. He also stated that the voting system never touches the RPI system, and that there will be “no way anyone will be able to hack into the system.”

In order to be prepared for such events as a power outage, there will be a stash of paper ballots. “There will still be paper backups,” Chase added. In the case of a power outage, Chase suggested that there would be a few minutes of down-time until the supervisors were able to get the paper ballots out and restart the voting process with those.

As for the candidates, it has been suggested by both Scherzer and Chase that they can rest easy in knowing that there will be a paper back-up of the ballots in case something happens to the system or they want to have a recount. “Candidates have always had the right to ask for a recount,” Scherzer stated. After each voter presses the confirm button on the screen, their vote goes into the system and a ballot is then printed out. This ballot, once reviewed and signed, goes into a ballot box. This box serves as a back up.

Not everyone, however, is that happy to see the change. Grand Marshal Michael Dillon said, “I think that the best system, in terms of accountability and reliability, is always a pen and paper system.”

He explained that earlier iterations of the plan had called for solely electronic voting. He said that his concerns over reliability and accountability was “why [he] insist[ed] that this e-voting system have paper backups.” He added that these backups eliminate the possibility of messing up.

While Dillon said that the “optical scan works very well,” he said that the current e-voting plan is “functional and meets the needs of the Rules and Elections Committee.”