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Apathy, rain kept voters at bay

By Ray Hafner
Senior Staff Writer

Students and poll workers alike skipped out on the second day of Student Government Association voting, with some locations understaffed and others seeing as little as one voter per hour.

"We designed redundancy into the staffing and it still wasn't enough," said assistant election commissioner Cullen Newsom. The technical problems that developed Wednesday, and continued to a lesser extent Thursday, could have been solved in a few minutes if there had been enough staff, he said.

Typically, student organizations volunteer to staff the polling places and earn money for their organizations. This year, several organizations signed up for shifts and never came, commissioners said.

"About 95 percent of the people I asked if they wanted to vote they said no," said Xavier Cano, who was staffing the location in the PGH Breezeway, the busiest location.

"A lot of people don't know; they thought we were selling something," said Mai Nguyen, working at the Melcher location. Poll workers agreed that a sign identifying it as a polling place would have helped ease student confusion. 

Two locations -- the UC Satellite and the Law Center -- closed early at, about 6:30 p.m., commissioners said.

Newsom estimated that a "few hundred" people voted Wednesday, and said slightly less voted Thursday. During the rain, voting almost completely dropped off, he said.

Also absent were campaigning candidates. The commissioners said they only saw a handful of candidates at PGH and poll workers elsewhere said they didn't see any candidates.

Only five of the 31 SGA seats featured contested races this year. 

Poll workers said many students were unaware of who the candidates were, through a lack of either campaign materials or coverage in The Daily Cougar.

Newsom said he was confident there was no double voting this year. He did not know if any votes were lost, and will not know until the votes are tallied tomorrow.

"The computerized voting was a success, but the implementation we did was pretty clumsy," he said. The problems were minimal, though, because of the contingency paper ballots. 

For the most part, students found the computers, donated by Apple for the election, easy to use and had few complaints, he said. 

A few verbal complaints were made to Newsom about campaigning in classrooms and material too close to the polling places. He said the commission would follow up on those if they were submitted in writing.

The winners will be announced at 3 p.m. today in the World Affairs Lounge.
 

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