SHARKS UNITED Wins 2007-2008 SGA Election

Tanya Parnes, NSU News Editor

Issue date: 4/7/08 Section: News

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Philip Ortiz, a junior and finance major, is NSU's newly elected Student Government Association (SGA) president for the 2008-09 academic school year. Julian Brownlee is the newly elected Vice President of Legislative Affairs and Anthony Campenni is the newly elected Vice President of Judicial Affairs. The SHARKS UNITED party was victorious at the polls and were announced the winners at the victory party held in the Flight Deck on April 4 from 6 to 8 p.m.

"I think that Phil has worked very hard all year long and he really cares about the university," said Gary Gershman, J.D., Ph.D., one of the advisors to the SGA. "He will try very hard to do things to benefit the college. Every year SGA gets better and more involved. The voter turnout is a reflection of how hard Philip and his party have worked." Gershman hopes that those who did not win this election will still remain active within SGA in the upcoming year.

Terry Morrow, Director of Student Leadership and Civic Engagement and the other advisor to the SGA, was extremely happy with this year's voter turnout. "We only established the online voting system last year," said Morrow. "The goal is to allow all students to vote. We wanted to make sure that it was fair since not all students can make it to the polls." Morrow worked very closely with the Office of Information Technology (OIT) to help create a special Web link which all students could access in order to cast their votes. OIT ensured that students would only be able to vote once, so as to prevent any kind of abuse or misuse of the online voting system and to ensure that the election was fair.

There were some problems that arose however. "I think that there are always issues that arise and we always expect that," said Morrow. "We wait for them to come about and then deal with them." The issues Morrow is referring to involve the online voting system. "This year there were some students who were having problems voting online," said Morrow. "The first issue was that Banner told them they had already voted. The second issue was that Banner told several students that they were not authorized to use the system." SGA elections were set to begin Monday, March 31 and run through Thursday, April 3. "The link for online voting was sent out on Sunday, March 30 instead of that Monday, March 31 therefore the ballot was not quite ready yet," said Morrow. "Anyone who tried to use the online voting system on Sunday and had voted in last year's election was therefore told by the computer that they had already cast their vote. The computer was pulling up last year's records." Morrow was alerted to this problem when several students approached her about the glitch in the system.

Continued...

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