Today we are talking to Mr Veltkamp from the University of Osnabr\u00fcck, Germany, who recently decided to conduct their university elections with POLYAS’ online voting system. In the interview below, Mr Veltkamp explains why his university decided to vote online and how their election transpired.<\/p>\n
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The introduction of online voting was an executive committee decision. There were a few contributing factors: for one, we wanted to reduce the personnel costs involved. The ability to have an election that would not be fixed to a physical location was also an important factor as to why we decided to switch. Another factor was to allow students to vote at multiple polling stations – not just in their faculty department. An offline election like this would have been very challenging and would have inevitably incurred errors with both the distribution and counting of various ballot papers. In order to simplify such a complex election, we decided to offer our university elections online.<\/p>\n
Online voting can help avert human errors. With paper elections, we had the problem that some voters received incorrect ballot papers. Indeed, because many different people were involved as election volunteers, we didn’t have full control over the election. We have had similar problems in the past and more than one election has had to be repeated because of this. Online voting ensures that we don’t need to administer physical polling stations. Additionally, ballots were quickly and efficiently counted which was a great relief. This alone used to take over four hours.<\/p>\n
We also had a paper election ready on standby, as we weren’t sure whether the online election would work as we hoped. If anything would go wrong technically or organizationally, we could have organized a standard, paper election at short notice.<\/p>\n
Next time, when we will know how to use online voting effectively, we are aiming for more efficient election preparation and organization.<\/p>\n
The online election was received positively from the majority of voters and the election turnout increased slightly. Especially among students, we can conclude that voters were more satisfied than with paper elections.<\/p>\n
ASTA (The Student Union) sent out a reminder at the half way point in the election which was primarily aimed at students. The election turnout is usually lower amongst students in comparison to professors and academic staff.<\/p>\n
Because\u00a0the decision to go for online voting was made at relatively short notice, we didn’t post any information about the candidates online. Election news and information was, as customary, printed on paper and distributed through the standard channels.<\/p>\n
ASTA and other groups were prepared as they usually were – with placards. In our uni-canteen, for example, there was a banner about the online election. In addition, the election committee sent out an email to all voters to announce the start of the election period. Information about the election was also posted on our university portal – OSCA.<\/p>\n