Cambridge SU’s trustee board are deciding on whether to ditch their current voting platform, following concerns raised by members of the Student Council.

The Council voted (24/01) in favour of a motion that recommended the current voting system used in SU and most JCR elections be abandoned in favour of the ‘basic online ballot’ system (BOB). The BOB system was used in all elections before CUSU and the GU merged in July 2020.

SU trustees are to decide whether to implement the recommendation and are expected to deliver a statement at the next Student Council meeting on Monday (07/02).

According to the motion, the current outsourced system has “not been well received”, with complaints focusing on its transparency and accessibility. Nine college JCRs have chosen to abandon it in their elections.

SU Returning Officer Artem Khovanov explained that “the new system relies on SU staff counting the votes manually which could lead to miscounting or human error”. He says that the old BOB system was much more transparent because it sent voters a code, with which they could verify their vote against a list of anonymised votes to ensure that their ballot was cast correctly.

The new system has also faced criticism for being less user friendly; Artem described the webpage as “difficult to find” and said that users “struggle to work out how to register a vote”. He suggested that second preference votes were also being lost as a result of confusion over the system’s workings and people not understanding the single transferable vote system.

He suggested that these complexities may be a factor in low voter turnout. Turnout was 20.88% in the 2020 Cambridge SU elections, which represents a decrease from 22.2% the year before, when the old system was used.

Former Fitzwilliam JCR President Joshan Parmar explained why he chose not to use the SU’s system when organising the College’s elections in November. He claims it lacks “transparency flexibility and usability, all of which are crucial to running an election”. He believes the old system best accounts for unexpected situations that may arise, such as “when there are ties” and “when the candidates in an election change”.

Cambridge SU told Varsity that while they acknowledge the “important issues” the motion raises, they have “absolute confidence in their ability to conduct fair elections using the current system with the safeguards provided by the student Democracy Committee”.

Despite this, Democracy Committee members told Varsity “I wish we were on the old, much more open system”. Whether trustees will implement their recommendation is still unclear.