Following another year of spirited election campaigning, the political fate of each aspiring member of the student government will be left in the hands of a meticulously designed computer system.
Once the ASUC election polls close tonight at 11:59 p.m., the votes will be tallied by a Java system called ASUC Tabulator at the tabulations ceremony at 6:30 p.m. on April 18 in 155 Dwinelle Hall.
The process of vote tabulation begins tomorrow as the campus Information Services and Technology division will convert the raw data generated by online and paper ballots into a more organized and usable format.
“Then at the tabulation ceremony, we’ll go through each office, starting probably with the executives, and use the ASUC tabulator to count each vote individually,” said sophomore Alton Zheng, one of the technical coordinators for the ASUC election.
Like in previous years, this year the ASUC Elections Council will be using the preferential proportional representation system, in which students can vote for multiple candidates, ranking chosen candidates in order of preference.
According to the voter’s guide for the 2013 ASUC election, the election tabulator will tally the votes in “rounds.” The first preferences of all voters are tallied first. If no candidate achieves a majority of the votes in this round, each candidate with the lowest vote total is eliminated, and each student’s vote will be transferred to the voter’s next preference.
According to the ASUC bylaws, no election official or candidate will be allowed to see the results before they are unveiled at the ceremony.
“Even I won’t know the results until everyone else finds out at the ceremony,” said Jina Yoo, chair of the ASUC Elections Council.
As with any election technology, there is a possibility that errors will arise during the tabulations ceremony. But the technical coordinators say they are confident that the vote tabulator will generate accurate results.
“It’s actually pretty accurate — nothing with the system went wrong last year,” Zheng said.
The results will be continuously updating throughout the tabulations ceremony and on the ASUC election’s website next Thursday.
Contact Jason Liu at [email protected].