Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) is to pilot online voting in next year’s class representative elections.
Students from the schools of engineering, nursing, medicine, and computer science and statistics will be allowed to vote for their class representatives online. TCDSU council will discuss the plans for the pilot of online voting this evening.
In an email statement to The University Times, the Chair of the union’s Electoral Commission, Stephen Sheil, said: “We’re very excited to trial it among the four schools and delighted with the progress made by the dedicated students working on the project.”
Students will be able to log in to a voting page with a Trinity email address and submit their preferences. Voting information will be kept confidential.
Online voting has been mooted in the past as a way for the union to increase engagement and voter turnout at elections. Every year, the union holds class representative elections at the beginning of the year and sabbatical officer elections in February. Additionally, the union also occasionally holds referendums for changes to long-term policy.
In an email statement to The University Times, Daniel O’Reilly, a third-year engineering student and the project manager for online voting, who wrote the original vote-counting program, said that the “team aren’t focusing much on what happens after the trial in 2019, we’re just working to build a system that can successfully handle the elections of all 4 test schools”.
“If we make voting easier, more people will vote and get involved”, he said.
A successful pilot could see TCDSU introduce online voting for sabbatical officer elections in 2020. The union has made efforts to engage more people with elections, running campaigns to get women to run and incentivising students to vote using spot prizes.
A report on this year’s class representative elections, put together by the union, showed low engagement and uncertainty among students over how to vote. It also recorded a low turnout at an event designed to inform students about how to run for the position.
Class representatives are members of TCDSU’s council and vote on the union’s policies. They also vote in the union’s part-time officers and sub-committees. The representatives are invited to a two-day training event where they learn about campaigning, welfare and the union’s structures. Class representatives also usually sit on school and course committees as student representatives.
After one student complained during this year’s class representative elections, TCDSU allowed for a re-open nominations on the ballot paper for one uncontested race. Typically, in uncontested elections of class representatives, the candidate is elected automatically and no ballot papers are used for that class.
A plebiscite, aimed at determining student opinion on smoke-free zones on campus, was held in conjunction with this year’s class representatives. Students voted overwhelmingly in favour of a smoke-free campus.
The number of representatives in a class is determined by the number of students in it and so larger classes can see several people elected and attending TCDSU’s council.
