Dominic McGrath | Contributing Writer
Trinity College Dublin Students’ Union (TCDSU) has announced its intention to make available online voting for sabbatical officer elections. The option of e-voting will be available to students who cannot reach the polling stations usually provided on campus or at off-campus teaching sites at St. James’s and Tallaght Hospitals and D’Olier Street.
This service is being extended to facilitate Erasmus students in addition to students on placement to see that they are not deprived of their opportunity to decide the leadership of the Student Union.
This is an issue that the union’s Electoral Commission has grappled with, with varying degrees of success, in recent years. Postal voting has been used to assist those students who couldn’t vote in person in the past, trialled first in 2012/13 unsuccessfully, faring slightly better last year when 40 students used this option.
It is hoped that this recent step towards making voting for off campus students a lot easier will be successful, with the expectation that it will be embraced much less tentatively than postal voting.
However, it is not only students who cannot vote in person who will benefit; TCDSU should also benefit from this switch. Postal voting provided a lot of administrative difficulties for the SU, an investment of effort that wasn’t rewarded in the response of the student body.
Kieran McNulty, Chair of the Electoral Commission, emphasised that online voting would be instantaneous, overcoming a real weakness of postal voting, in that students found it difficult to get their vote back in time for the election.
TCDSU hopes that the process of online voting will be very simple, considering the large amounts of work that has gone in to create base for the voting.
McNulty also addressed a number of concerns over online voting, with regards to how the votes will be counted, and whether there was a potential for security risks. He confirmed that the online votes will be transferred onto a paper ballot, which he hopes will be “relatively simple.” The Union’s technical staff are responsible for ensuring the ballot’s security.
At the time of publication, 57 people have registered an interest in using the new online system to cast their vote using a Google Form posted to the TCDSU Facebook page. This represents an improvement on the number of students who made use of the 2014 postal voting system, offering hope for the arrangement’s longevity.
