After unauthorized changes were made to the online voting system in last year’s first Student Council election, causing mass confusion, outrage and distrust, voting for this year’s election on April 26 will take place on ElectionBuddy — a voting software dedicated to holding secure and accurate elections — if the website gets approval by the University. If ElectionBuddy is not approved, the Student Council election on April 26 would use a GoogleForm like last year’s second all-school election.
With ElectionBuddy, students in grades 9-11 will each receive a unique link through school email, which they can use to vote. Asher Grossman, one of the two directors of student technology services, said he has no concerns regarding the security of this year’s election.
“From the testing that I’ve done and that the Executive Board has done, ElectionBuddy seems very secure, and we’ve gone through and thought about what happened in the past, how can we improve it and what are other possible security measures,” Asher said, adding that unique links will ensure security.
Sonali Shaw, the other director of student technology services, said the biggest difference between voting on ElectionBuddy instead of the Student Council website is that students will no longer be able to easily change their votes during the day.
Sonali said, “But we are going to publicize that you can email us. Everyone is going to have a voter key, and if you tell us your key we can manually change your vote or allow you to vote again. So there is a workaround, it’s just more cumbersome.”
According to Asher, ElectionBuddy was chosen due to concerns Dean of Students Ana Campos raised about the security of a student-run website.
“She felt that using an actual, vetted, professional system rather than one designed by us was better,” Asher said. All-School President Zoe Nathwani said that given how upset the student body was last year, she doesn’t think anyone will attempt to hack this year’s election.
“I think what happened last year was kind of an anomaly, and I think generally speaking people are pretty upset about it happening,” Zoe said. “I mean, no one wants to wait that long for an election result to come out, and it’s just kind of unsettling for an election to be hacked. … Because that happened and because it wasn’t a pleasant thing that happened, I’m really hoping that it won’t happen again.”
