Online voting could cause changes in campus politics

  Michael Weiner Weiner is a fourth-year
history and political science student. His column analyzing issues
of interest to the UCLA community runs on Mondays. E-mail [email protected]

For UCLA’s undergraduate student government, the future
will have to wait at least a little while longer.

After flirting briefly with the brave new world of online
voting, the Undergraduate Students Association Council seems poised
to hold its annual elections in the traditional pencil-to-Scantron
fashion for at least one more year.

At its weekly meeting last Tuesday, the council voted down an
Internet voting scheme proposed by Election Board Chair Alex Kaplan
that would have extended the my.UCLA-based system used in
December’s special election to the general elections to be
held in May. Kaplan has since resigned.

Internal Vice President Elias Enciso, in tandem with a computer
science expert, suggested his own Web voting program. But that
system is unlikely to be operational in time for the elections,
which must be held this quarter. So most likely, USAC will approve
the tried-and-true Scantron method, perhaps at its Tuesday
meeting.

Nonetheless, it seems inevitable that online voting will become
the norm at UCLA in the not-too-distant future. Students got a
taste of that future four months ago when Evan Okamura was elected
external vice president in an online special election. Notably,
voter turnout was 50 percent higher than it had been in past
special elections.

If Internet elections have the potential for increasing
participation at such significant levels, conventional wisdom
suggests that student government officers would be eager to get
them started, notwithstanding their legitimate concerns about
privacy, hacking and block voting. And indeed, these are the very
concerns that prevented the council from approving the online
election this year.

Yet there is another reason that some council members might be
hesitant to sanction Internet voting. That is the recognition that
Web-based elections could endanger the long-standing dominance of
the Praxis slate in student government. Whether or not current
Praxis council members consciously realize this threat, I cannot
say. But the potential hazard to Praxis should be clear to anyone
who understands student voting patterns.

Turnout in last year’s general election was a little under
24 percent. This is consistent with statistics from recent years,
with the proportion of undergraduates voting in USAC elections
rarely topping 30 percent.

The strength of Praxis and its predecessor, Students First!, has
always been its ability to get the vote from its base of minority
student advocacy groups such as the African Student Union and La
Familia. Say what you will about their politics, but Praxis
candidates have always run very effective campaigns and their voter
base is disciplined and consistent.

This consistency lies in stark contrast to Praxis’ chief
opponents over the years: candidates from the Greek system. During
the last decade, fraternity and sorority leaders have never been
able to maintain the interest in their rank-and-file to field a
solid and experienced slate from year to year.

There are no specific statistics available on the breakdown of
student voters, but it is clear from Praxis’ continued
dominance of USAC that members of the Greek system do not vote with
anywhere near the consistency of their student advocacy group
counterparts. Last year’s narrow election of presidential
candidate Elizabeth Houston, a sorority member, was a notable
exception to the normally lackluster mobilization of Greek support,
and was still not enough to elect other Greek candidates further
down the ballot.

All of this brings us back to the specter of online voting.
Judging from the significant increase in turnout in
December’s special election, a Web-based general election in
a competitive year could raise the participation level to as high
as 45 percent of the undergraduate student body.

The question Praxis members have to ask themselves is: Where are
those extra voters going to come from? They aren’t going to
come from student advocacy groups because those students already
vote in highly consistent numbers. That leaves the Greek system, as
well as those unaffiliated students who are sufficiently interested
in campus politics to take the time to vote. And my suspicion is
that a significant majority of these students are unhappy with the
way Praxis operates.

Of course, my analysis could be presumptuous. It’s
possible that the December special election was a fluke, and that
online voting won’t increase turnout the way I think it
will.

But if I’m right, the brave new world of Internet
elections does not bode well for Praxis. When ““ not if
““ Web voting reaches UCLA, it won’t just herald a sea
of change in the undergraduate electoral system, but quite possibly
in the entire political culture of this campus.