The number of votes cast for this year’s fee referendums and Leader of the Pack ballot has more than doubled since last year’s fee vote, Greg Doucette, Student Senate president and senior in computer science, said.
“It’s actually turned out a lot higher than I expected,” Doucette said. “As of 6:45 this evening, we’ve had 2,187 students vote. That’s more than double the number of students that voted for the fee referendums and about 600 more than what voted for Leader of the Pack last year.”
Student Government’s goal was to have 2,500 students participate in the polls, he said. Doucette said he believes that number will be reached and surpassed before Tuesday morning. Students can continue to vote until midnight Wednesday.
Several factors contributed to the amount of participation in the polls, Doucette said.
“We had a lot of publicity this year about Leader of the Pack and fee referendums,” he said. “Student Government also did a lot of promoting. Jay [Dawkins] sent out an e-mail to 30,000 students telling them about the poll. Also, with the economy the way it is, there’s been a lot of attention of the fee situation in general.”
Anthony Tuttle, a sophomore in engineering, said he has become very passionate about voicing his opinions on campus this semester largely due to the organizations he is involved in.
“I’m pretty heavily involved in Hispanic organizations on campus and one of the fee increases calls for a faculty member to advocate for the hispanic organizations,” Tuttle said. “Right now, we have one that handles Native American and Hispanic groups, and that’s a pretty big undertaking, especially with the number of Hispanic students we have on campus.”
Tuttle also said he feels students should share their opinion on where money goes, since fees will be going up anyway.
Several Student Government officers will be compiling data and sharing their findings with the Fee Advisory Committee Thursday, Doucette said.
“My part of the project is taking the questions and putting them in a slide and talk about how the voting went, and how many people voted, based class and college,” he said. “[Dawkins’] staff is working on the priority questions. If a group requested a fee, where should the money go. We want the fee committee to have a broad look at student sentiment.”
Tuttle said it was a good idea to include the Leader of the Pack ballot and the fee referendums in the same poll.
“I remember having two ballots last year, and I didn’t even bother with the fee referendums,” he said. “With having it all on one ballot, you’re already logged in and it doesn’t take that much longer to finish both of them. The combined ballots were easy to understand and the interface was very user-friendly.”
Doucette said there haven’t been any major problems with the poll so far, though the large size of videos resulted in long download times. Videos of Fee Advisory Meetings were taped and provided to students to base their decisions on.
“So far everything has run smoothly,” he said. “The only problems we’ve encountered so far are with the videos and the size of the files. They’re so large that it’s hard to download. Most of the people I talked downloaded the video on ResNet and it took quite a while. Hopefully we can compress the video files next year so they’re smaller.”
Though many students voiced their opinions on fee referendums, some students, such as Casey Parris, a sophomore in zoology, said she felt that the finalists for Leader of the Pack weren’t publicized enough.
“I didn’t vote in Leader of the Pack because I didn’t feel like I knew any of the candidates well enough,” Parris said. “They want us to help decide on who receives a scholarship and I didn’t want to just pick somebody I didn’t know because I don’t think that’s fair. There are other people who genuinely know these people and what kind of character they have, and I feel like they should be the ones voting.”
