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University of Maine Student Government re-elections are tentatively scheduled for Nov. 18 and will “definitely” be held on a new third-party software platform called StudentVoice, according to SG Vice President Ross Wolland.
The change comes after complaints brought against the FirstClass system by presidential candidates Chris Knoblock and Nelson Carson and vice presidential candidate Ryan Gavin at the Nov. 2 meeting of the General Student Senate charging that the system was faulty. They claimed that approximately 200 students had unsuccessfully tried to vote in the student government executive election on FirstClass Oct. 28.
After the senate voted to have the election results overturned, student Sen. Alex Ortiz sponsored a bill to have the current executives and the Fair Elections Practices Commission find an alternative method for holding elections. If they were unable to do so within 48 hours o the meeting, the senate would have to reconsider using FirstClass or holding a paper ballot election.
Wolland, along with President Brian Harris and FEPC Chair Skye Landry, led the search for a suitable replacement for FirstClass. Wolland said the program would work by sending an e-mail to each undergraduate student’s FirstClass account on the day of elections.
The e-mail should contain a link unique to each student that will direct him or her to an extension of StudentVoice’s website. From there, students will be able to click on the candidate that they want to vote for or write in names in a text box.
Though the deal has yet to be finalized by the Executive Budgetary Committee —which oversees all senate allocations totaling more than $1,000 — Wolland said the program would likely cost $2,500, $500 of which the university has pledged to cover. This will be a one-time contract with the company, though Wolland did not leave out the possibility of future collaboration.
“At this point, it’s just a one-time thing,” he said. “If the service works, if we find that we have a lot of participation, we might think about choosing it for the future, but at this point it’s a single remedy to the problem that we had.”
According to its website, StudentVoice is a “comprehensive assessment platform for higher education” that provides a variety of services to collect and analyze university data. The company, based in Buffalo, N.Y., originated in 2002 and has worked with more than 400 universities across North America.
Bangor Daily News