Web Based Voting

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Web Based Voting

• Student Affairs Elections Software
• October 25, 2006

2
Short History

• Pre-2006 Elections processed by Schreyer
  Institute
• March 2006 Transitioned to Student Affairs
• Responsibilities moved to Student Affairs.
• Met with Schreyer Institute technical staff
• Analyzed requirements based on prior elections at
  Penn State, USG Elections code and other online
  election sites.
• Very important requirements processing occurs
  inside psu.edu and students administer the
  election.
• Determined that our in-house survey software
  would not meet requirements
• Evaluated vendor solutions (hosted)
• Decision to develop in-house
• August 2006 First of several meetings with
  transition chair for first student government
  election. Our solution was well received.

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Implementation of Project Plan

• Workload divided between software development
  team (3)
• 230 hours of analysis, design, development and
  testing
• Developed and prototyped to UPUA transition team
• Trained the Elections commission staff
• One Network Administrator
• 8 hours of web server installation
  (elections.psu.edu)
• Capital purchase of two new servers
• Installed servers in two locations
• Redundancy / Disaster Recovery
• The scalability requirement was stress tested at
  1000 votes/minute using OpenSTA

4
Software Features

• Some features worth mentioning
• Login with Penn State Access Account ID
• Ballots utilize Robson rotation
• Ballots can be created to allow one vote or
  multiple votes per voter
• The provision for write-in votes
• One vote per student
• Election and Voting can be restricted based on
• Date and Time (start and end)
• Campus
• Status (undergraduate, graduate, etc.)
• Other ISIS information (for students)
• Single ballots can also be restricted based on
• College
• Residence (on or off campus)
• Other ISIS information (for students)

5
Election Day

• Opened at 600 AM as defined in the software
• Locked at 1000 PM as defined in the software
• Results were verified for accuracy at 1045 PM
  and released.
• Zero duplicate voters.
• One minor data issue Affected 20 voters.
  Discovered and resolved at 730am. All 20 voters
  were given chance to vote for missing ballot
  position.
• Authentication was converted from WebAccess to
  Friends of Penn State at 415pm when WebAccess
  service was still degraded after 1hr.

6
Demonstrations

• Ballot builder and reports
• Voting

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Questions for you

• Should we charge for this service
• If yes, who and how much
• Is this service just for elections? What about
  surveys, questionnaires, polls?
• Is this service for student organizations
  exclusively?
• What unit will manage the elections?
• Is this service available to the campuses?

8
Future Elections

• UPUA University Park Undergraduate Association
• USG ?
• UPAC ?
• Homecoming ?
• Class Gift ?
• La Vie ?
• SGA ?

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• For more information
• Student Affairs Information Technology
• 814.865-7210
• help_at_sa.psu.edu
• To view slideshow and demonstrations
• http//www.sa.psu.edu/elections/elections.htm