The second semester student council election has elicited a new electronic voting system at Paly.

The student government decided to allow voting to be completely voluntary, after teachers from the history department voiced complaints to the council that the old mandatory voting system was flawed. According to a member of the council, the history teachers claimed that the old method of handing out ballots in social studies classes was undemocratic because it obligated students to vote, while the right to vote is actually discretionary.

In order to vote at home, a student must have changed their Shadow account password using a Windows computer on Paly campus. Every student has an account already set up, with the first letter of his/her first name combined with his/her last name as the username, and the first seven letters of the username as the password. 

When accessing the voting website at home, the login system connects to the Paly domain and digital locker servers viking1 and viking2, attempting to verify a student’s identity using LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) with his/her username and password. If the student is authenticated, the database looks at the graduation year, which is pre-recorded. The voting page checks the student’s grade and only permits a vote to be made if the chosen representative is in the matching grade, thus ensuring that a student can vote only for officers in his/her own grade.

Upon voting, if the student has selected a candidate in at least one category, his/her login name,computer information, and time of voting is noted in the database. Therefore, the system makes certain that a student can only vote once. However, a student’s name is not associated with any person he/she voted for, hence voting will remain anonymous.

The system uses PHP, a programming language that lets web developers create interactive content, for the voting system and MySQL, the most popular software for accessing and processing data, to store a database of candidates and people who have voted. The password required to access this voting database will only be given to a few administrators and student council officials who are overseeing the election.

Only time will tell whether the new system serves its intended purpose.

The website [http://vote.paly.net] was activated Tuesday morning and will be up and running untilThursday at midnight.