Friday, March 29, 2024

CBA pioneers automated student council elections

by Kristine Ann M. Fernandez

COLLEGE OF BUSINESS Administration (CBA) Student Council successfully tested the program for their first ever automated student council elections on March 8. Spearheaded by Caesar Cavales III, senior Business Computers Application (BCA) student and Commission on Elections (COMELEC) chairperson of CBA, BCA department developed this application in order to speed up the election process.

Cavales said: “Due to the number of student population in CBA…some of the students would rather not vote than spend a few of their time writing down their chosen candidate and put it in a ballot box. So I thought that all these problems would be solved if automated voting would be implemented, it will be faster, accurate, and you wouldn’t need any pen and paper.”

Instead of pen and paper, students only need to present their validated identification cards to an assigned COMELEC member for verification. Once verified, the student will keyin her ID number in a box provided in the application to make sure that the voter is enrolled this semester and avoid voting twice. After the confirmation, students can cast their votes by clicking the picture of the candidate. A summary appears at the end of the selection in order for the voters to double check their choices. To finalize their votes, they only have to click the ‘VOTE’ button. The last stage of verification is the imprinting of the voter’s thumb mark on a printed copy of their votes. COMELEC will keep the hard copy in case a party asks for a recount.

“We will have this system audited at the SU offce of audit to assure the voters and candidates that the system that they will be using this coming CBA council election is true and correct,” said Cavales.

Junabeth Tamparong, incumbent Governor of CBA’s student council, says the project costs around P13,000 because they only spent for the printers and they utilized their available computers in their laboratories. But if they opted with the touch screen monitors and barcode readers, it would probably cost around P50,000.

The program was co-developed by fellow BCA students Andrea Caro, Clint Bush Casama, Al Polen Sincay Jr., and Mae Avanzado.

After last week’s test run, Cavales received a positive response from the student body assuring them of an effcient and effective elections.

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