On Tuesday and Wednesday, courtesy of the Dartmouth computer network and the Internet, students will vote from the privacy of their roomsand the electronic ballots they fill out may even include each candidate's platform.
Linda Kennedy, associate director of student services, said today students will receive a card in their Hinman boxes that explains the World Wide Web page location for the elections and give instructions as to how to vote.
By accessing the page at http://www.dartmouth.edu/projects/election, students will connect to a secure server that can exchange information without other sources tapping in Kennedy said.
All election materials can be retrieved from this page where students can cast their ballots for next year's officers for the Class Councils, Committee on Standards, Green Key Society and Student Assembly, she said.
Kennedy said the electronic voting and tallying system will drastically reduce the amount of time necessary to count individual paper ballots.
"This will be so simple -- I'll just push a button and the results will be done," Kennedy said.
Tom Caputo '96, who helped create the electronic medium for voting, said the "polls" will close at 8 p.m. on Wednesday and the results will be tabulated immediately thereafter.
Caputo said he did not know exactly when results would be available. He said the computer should be able to tabulate the results within minutes, but results may not be released for several hours.
Kennedy said the Green Key Society will play a smaller role in this year's elections than it has in years past because the members of the Green Key Society had to count the individual paper ballots.
"All you need to vote is the card and your BlitzMail password. It will be very exciting," Kennedy said.
Students who do not have easy access to the network or have problems connecting can vote using computers set up in the Collis Center, she said.
She said voting by computer should improve turnout. In past years, less than half the student body has turned out to vote.
This could help bring more people to the polls, Kennedy said. "It will mean that a lot of people can find their ways to the polls who have not in the past."
"There are lots of students, for example, engineering students whose discipline requires that they spend a lot of time in the engineering school, who would have to be very dedicated to the student government to walk all the way to Collis," she said.
Now, these students can easily vote using their computers, she said.
Kennedy added that students will be able to vote over a period of two days, which should also help bring in more votes.
There is one other important distinction, Kennedy said. Because of the electronic nature of the medium, the text of a candidate's platform can appear on the electronic ballot.
"Not all the candidates will have that because they didn't turn it in on time," Kennedy said. "About 35 candidates did."
The College has considered instituting this computer voting system for several years, Kennedy said.
"There were many questions about how to assure secure voting and who could do what," Kennedy said.
Caputo said he is certain the security of the voting process is absolute.
"We have had a couple of people working real hard to break it," Caputo said. "We don't think there is any way to break into it."
He said he learned about similar Web elections at Stanford University and thought it might be an effective way for Dartmouth to hold elections.
Caputo, along with Kiewit Computational Services, wrote the script. The Web page will be accessible through Netscape and other Web browsers.
"The initial version ran the senior executive elections a couple of months ago and went through modifications," Caputo said. "This is a little bit different because there are multiple races and different classes voting for different races. That functionality had to be incorporated."
Caputo said the page will ask the students to specify their class and then ask for the student's name and password.
"It verifies your password and verifies that the class that you said you are a member of corresponds to your record," Caputo said.
The materials necessary for the elections have been developed by Caputo and Michael Pryor '98, along with the assistance of several developers at Kiewit, Caputo said.
"Since we're electing people for undergraduate offices at Dartmouth College, this script will only accept DND names," Kennedy said. "You can write Mickey Mouse but it'll reject it. You also have to spell the name right."
