Nominations open for Union Big Elections

Nominations for the Union’s ‘Big Elections’ opened on Monday 13 February with students able to put themselves forward as candidates for departmental and sabbatical positions. The site’s look and feel has been radically changed from previous elections, and the voting statistics have reportedly been revamped.

The decision to make the elections different came from the central services manager and marketing departments in the union, who believe the change will increase turnout even more. The new logo and redesign was used to improve usability and rid the elections website of the previously used grey and green colour scheme, bringing the site in line with imperialcollegeunion.org and eActivities. Union Systems Administrator and RCSU Vice President (Operations) Paul Beaumont worked with Jonathan Kim, responsible for many web projects including FelixOnline, to produce the new website’s features.

When the 2011 Sabbatical and Student Trustee elections opened, the site crashed due to high demand, causing all other resources on the server to become temporarily unavailable. This was due to the marketing and elections systems being on the same server which hosts clubs’ and societies’ webpages, Dougal. The union has four servers: Pinky, Perky, Dougal and Heeps, of which Beaumont is in charge of the latter two.

Steps have been taken to ensure such a crash does not happen this time, with the voting website being moved to the Perky server in order to restrict access to union staff only and prevent high demand taking down other vital resources.

Elections will get physical in a couple of weeks Paul Beaumont – Union Systems Administrator

The Big Elections include faculty and departmental positions all under one system. As a result, all positions are shown in one list and can be hard to navigate. Beaumont told Felix that this was due to “there being one overseeing returning officer” and that “things will change once nominations close”. It is a constitutional requirement that the list of all positions is shown, and Union President Scott Heath’s interpretation of the constitution has resulted in the display of the number of seconders a candidate has being capped at the maximum of 20.

The statistics website will go live around the weekend before voting opens, and a number of technical (as well as aesthetic) improvements have been made. For instance, the stats will now be pushed to clients from the server rather than the browser frequently pulling data, reducing load and the potential of crashing. When the nominations website went live and the Union advertised that they were open, the site was still not accepting logins to the elections system. Beaumont explained that “the server was tested for a fortnight and its time had gone out of sync by twenty minutes in that period”, adding that “it’s fine now since the server is safe and secure in one of the College’s datacenters, and the server has been set to autosync time”, assuring it will never go wrong again.

The official Twitter hashtag for the elections is #voteicu, which started to receive use around the same time as Deputy President (Education) Jason Parmar tweeted that the hashtag of the week should be #loveyourrep for Rep Week. On the suggestion of a hashtag war, Beaumont explained that he believes “the Union’s tweeting as much for the elections as it is for rep week, and the reps have had more of a physical presence across campus”. He added that the “elections will get physical in a couple of weeks”.

The electronic ballot box for voting has also been improved, with candidates’ manifestos and pictures being displayed on the voting screen, shuffled for fairness. A brief explanation of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system is also provided, and the list of seconders (constitutionally made public) may be used in the marketing website. Beaumont told Felix that he is “happy with how the system’s been received” and that he thinks “everyone’s taken it well”.