The Board of Elections has installed online voting for student elections. The Web site can be accessed through Student Central with a PID and personal access code.
Students, including those accessing the Internet from an off-campus location, can vote online from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. today. Paper ballots will not be available.
Jeremy Tuchmayer, chairman of the Board of Elections, said the Web site will have the names of candidates listed in a scroll-down format with the option of clicking on a button or writing-in a candidate in the available box.
The listed order of positions is as follows: student body president, Carolina Athletic Association president, senior class officers, Graduate and Professional Student Federation president, Residence Hall Association president, Student Congress positions and the fare-free transit referendum.
A polling site with staff available to help voters will be located in Union 213 from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Continuing seniors who wish to vote for senior class officers must vote at the polling site.
Frederick Hill, assistant chairman of the board, said some votes will have to be manually tabulated, and results are not expected until a few hours after the online polls close at 10 p.m.
The Internet option makes voting feasible for students studying abroad.
"They would be able to vote, but the voting system is on Eastern Standard Time," Tuchmayer said. "But the poll is open for nearly 17 hours, so that would probably be convenient at some time for those students also."
And in a year when words such as "butterfly ballot" and "dangling chads" bombarded the national vocabulary, fears of problems with a technologically advanced voting system became legitimate issues. The new voting system underwent a three-day test run last week. The Board of Elections found voters through sending out the test URL to listservs and through word of mouth. The site was visited by 101 test voters.
