At its Wednesday night meeting, the ASUC Senate voted to permanently remove five campus voting locations for a combined savings of nearly $2,000.

The decision is a good first step, but the ASUC shouldn't stop there. By the same logic that informed the senate's vote to close a few polling locations, it should commit to implementing an online-only election system and close all of them.

In a time and place in which almost everything else is done electronically, expecting the vote for student government officials to take place online is hardly unreasonable. We pick classes online, pay tuition online, and, increasingly, complete and submit assignments online. The campus already functions on an assumption of universal access to the Internet-be it at home or from one of the campus libraries or computing stations.

Though security is always a concern, partial online voting in previous years has been managed successfully and safely. With continuing technical oversight, there's no reason the system can't fully replace physical polling stations.

The strongest argument against moving all voting online is, of course, not about computers but about people-that without the physical reminder of polling stations, students only vaguely interested in their government simply won't bother to vote. With an effective publicity campaign in advance of the next election, however, it's possible to offset this effect. We all know how good these people are at passing out fliers.

That publicity campaign would cost a fraction of what it does to operate polling stations across campus. There's no need to pay poll workers to guard laptops for hours when we're all perfectly capable of using the Internet. There's no need for elections to cost us this much. Tell your senators to commit to online-only voting for the next election.