by Rivkela Brodsky
Daily Lobo
There are 6,000 members of GPSA, but only one showed up to the presidential candidate debate Monday morning.
Instead of having a debate, Buckner Creel, GPSA president, and Andrea Gunderson, a presidential candidate, sat in the Santa Ana room in the SUB and talked about an issue that came up in last year's election.
The 2004 election was the first time online voting was used. Gunderson, who sat on the election commission committee last year, said there was concern because some graduate and professional students were not able to vote online.
Debbie Morris, director of Student Activities, said some first-time online voters didn't realize until voting began that students without a Net ID could not vote.
Notices about online voting did not go out to students without a UNM e-mail or to those not on the Graduate and Professional Student Association e-mail list.
She said GPSA introduced online voting to try to get more people to vote.
In the 2004 election, 661 people voted as compared with 200 to 300 people the year before, Morris said, adding those numbers could be affected by factors other than online voting.
Online voting requires a Net ID through CIRT, something graduate and professional students might not have if they belong to a program with a different e-mail server.
For example, students in the medical school will have their name followed by @salud.unm.edu. Students in the law school or in the math department might also have different endings on their e-mail address.
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Students are not required to sign up for a Net ID.
Some of those students were not able to vote online last year because they did not have a Net ID.
Creel, however, said he was not aware it was an issue.
Morris said there was not a recount in 2004 because of the discrepancy.
Pavan Madhira, chair of the election committee, said it should not be an issue this year. He added last year it was not much of an problem.
"It was a known fact that people have to have a Net ID," he said.
Madhira said in an e-mail there were enough efforts to make people aware of needing a Net ID in order to vote online. He said if students don't have one, they can still use a paper ballot.
He said many of the departments on north campus are their own entities and have nothing to do with CIRT. He said CIRT is looking into getting those domains to work under CIRT.
Linda Miller, associate director of information services at CIRT, said this is not true and is not technically possible.
She said CIRT encourages people to get a Net ID.
"The Net ID tends to be required for more and more things," she said.
Miller said any person who has an e-mail with a different domain can get a Net ID.
"If they don't have a Net ID, you can easily create one," she said. "It should not be a conflict."
Miller said it takes 10 minutes to 15 minutes for a Net ID to work after registering for one, but students who did not register for a Net ID by the end of the day on Friday will not be able to vote online.
Miller said Net IDs of graduate and professional students had to be authenticated by Friday so only those eligible could vote in the election.
Madhira said 227 votes were cast as of 3 p.m. Monday.
Online voting started at 8 a.m. Monday and closes Thursday at 4 p.m.
Five voting booths are also on main and north campuses through Thursday and run from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Editor's note: Madhira usually posts the Daily Lobo to the web but won't be for the duration of the election to avoid a conflict of interest.
