For the first time in the history of Oberlin College, students will have the opportunity to vote for this year’s slate of Senate candidates online.
“It’s somewhat advanced from the dark ages of voting at Oberlin,” sophomore senator Behrad Mahdi said. Created by junior senator Alex Zorach, the interim Communications Coordinator for Senate, this online system is far from perfect, but still advances Senate’s goal of providing additional venues of outreach to all students.
Students will still have the option of voting on paper ballots, but the online system, linked from the Senate webpage, will hopefully attract students who spend less time in the mailroom and more time on the computer. Senate based a large part of its decision to use the system on the College’s use of Presto as a registration tool. “If students have to register for classes online, the school is assuming every student has the ability to get online then -- we can use that as well,” Mahdi said.
Much like with paper balloting, students will still have to provide their T-number as well as their OCMR box to vote online. Senators will then have to validate every vote, both paper and electronic, to make sure each T-number corresponds with the OCMR given. An exorbitant amount of time will also be spent cross-checking the online votes with the paper ballots to ensure that no one has voted more than once. Senators found themselves confronted with deciding the fate of votes which were cast multiple times by a single student. “I wanted people to be able to override an accidental or incorrect online vote with a paper ballot,” Zorach said in explaining the design of the online voting system.
Votes which cannot be validated due to mismatched or missing T and OCMR numbers will be discarded. Should any student vote both online and by paper ballot, the paper ballot will be counted as their intended vote. At the close of the 12-day nomination period last Friday, 15 students had been nominated to fill five available seats. Of those 15, only two candidates, Allison Evans and Rebecca Ganetzky, had submitted candidate
statements. Elections will run from Sept. 17 through the 21st or until 20 percent of the student body votes, whichever is later. Following the completion of the elections, the full Senate will embark on a training and team building retreat on the weekend of Oct. 6.
Working with the Senior Class President Menna-Heiwot Demessie, four members of Student Senate have been aggressively coordinating this week’s Discussion Series to more broadly address issues raised by the events of Sept. 11. One of the driving forces behind this event, sophomore senator Shahana Siddiqui, said “the purpose of this is to bring people together and have a more informed discussion about these topics. It’s so professors can come provide us with information and resources that will give additional insight to help further discussions beyond what we might find on CNN or in the news.”
Senior senators Ni’Ja Whitson, Kasi Chakravartula and sophomore senator Julie Dulani are working with Siddiqui and Demessie to put together this event. They jointly praised the Multicultural Resource Center for their immediate and thorough show of support last Tuesday and also cited Nancy Dye’s office as being an invaluable resource in this endeavor. Having been evacuated from Disneyland, where he was vacationing with his family, during last Tuesday’s tragic events, Associate Dean of Students Bill Stackman said, “In the five years I have been watching this organization, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Senate take a lead in something quite like this. It’s fantastic.”
The final order of business addressed by the Senate this week was the immediate need to interview students for faculty committees. Senate holds the responsibility for interviewing and appointing students to seats on committees ranging from Housing and Dining, the Student Finance Committee and Judicial Board to the Educational Plans and Policies committee.
Interviews for these committees will begin immediately. Interested students should sign up for an interview time on the bulletin board outside of Wilder 222 or email osenate@oberlin.edu for further information.
To vote in the Senate election, see a complete list of faculty committee seats available, or read the candidate statements of those running for Senate, reference the Senate website at www.oberlin.edu/~senate/.