Elections go electronic

At a meeting on 8 March, the Student Parliament decided to introduce electronic voting at the University of Oslo (UiO). This is something that the student politicians have been fighting for since 2001, and President of the Student Parliament, Lina Johanne Strand, is happy that the decision finally has been made.

– The system is very easy to use, and the students will be able to log onto the internet pages with the same username and password that they use on their usual student account in order to cast a vote. During the voting period from 23 to 26 April, you can even change your vote frequently up until the last moment, Strand explains.

Universitas has previously informed that, Petter Reinholdtsen, a systems administrator at UiO, claims that the electronic voting system does not comply with democratic standards. His reasons are that the votes can be traced back to the user accounts, that the results can be changed by «disloyal employees», and that it is difficult to verify that all the votes has been correctly accounted for.

Strand, on the other hand, does not agree that electronic voting is undermining the principle of secret balloting.

– The Centre for Information Technology at the university (USIT) has guaranteed that they have done everything they can to make the system as anonymous as possible. This is one of the technical challenges that has been addressed, but it is important to remember that the old system had a number of challenges as well. The advantage with an electronic election is that we have the ability to reach far more voters than before, Strand says, but adds that she cannot guarantee that more students will vote, only that more people get the chance to do so.

– In Bergen, the election turnout almost doubled when electronic voting was introduced, while in Trondheim it went down.

– Do you think that this will engage the non-voters?

– Yes, I think so, but that doesn’t mean that we can sit back and relax. Electronic voting may increase voting turnout, but we still have to make people aware of what goes on at the Parliament, Strand says.