Princeton Undergraduate Student Government

At today's meeting, members from the Princeton Survey Research Center joined us, further expanding what I will now call the USG Elections Advisory Council.  This interoffice council that will continue to meet through the summer now consists of the following members:

Since the previous meeting, Matt Immordino and I met to determine which features the ideal elections system would include.  For the meeting, I created the following three documents:

Elections Protocol (Simplified)	System Feature Map	System Implementation Outline
An outline of the elections process as it pertains to the electronic voting system	A high-level map of features and functions for the new election system	An intricate discussion of how I would propose approaching this project from a design perspective
Download	Download	Download

After my presentation, we discussed the possible alternatives for implementing the system.

One particularly noteworthy development since the previous meeting was that I was approached by Dan O'Shea, a recently-graduated Princetonian who in the not-too-distant past had served in a role in the USG similar to my own.  Dan offered to build the system for $5000 and to deliver it on our timeframe.  From the beginning, I had been averse to the idea of having a student (or former student) develop the system because of concerns about impartiality and support (I suspect Dan will not want to be providing technical assistance on this system ten years from now).

However, the prospect of coming in well under budget and working with a developer who has had previous experience managing USG elections made this possibility very attractive.  I proposed the following two solutions to avoid the "ongoing support" dilemma:

1. Have Dan work in conjunction with OIT DAS to develop the system, so that DAS can then support the system.  This would allow Dan to develop the software and DAS to simultaneously give feedback on the development and develop an understanding for future support needs.
   
2. Whenever changes are required for the system, hire a student to make the changes.  In the past, students have been compensated for helping develop and maintain USG web applications, and it has been successful.

However, neither of these two options seemed to make this work.  First, DAS cannot operate in a way to make idea 1 possible -- that's not something they are willing to do.  Second, the general consensus was that, paid or not, finding students to reliably maintain the code is something we do not want to have as an ongoing burden.

Next, Edward Freeland of the Survey Center mentioned that the university had recently purchased a license to use the Qualtrics survey platform.  According to Edward and Naila, Qualtrics is a new system they use to conduct surveys with which they have been very pleased.  Qualtrics is in use by other universities, companies, and the federal government, so it is a proven system.  In addition, Qualtrics is eager to accomodate our custom needs, as demonstrated by their assistance with previous research surveys conducted on campus.

Naila had previously mentioned this project to Qualtrics, who had said that they could develop the part of the system that allows candidates to submit their own information to the election for $2000.  This modification would simply extend the existing Qualtrics architecture to meet our needs.  This is a reasonable price for this component, so I suspect that we could implement most, if not all of the desired features and still remain within our original maximum budget of $15,000.

However, there is one significant caveat: if the Princeton Research Survey Center decides to switch survey providers, as they recently did, and abandon Qualtrics, the investment we made to get Qualtrics to work for us would become almost useless without Qualtrics.  Even if the USG wanted to continue using the Qualtrics system, the annual costs associated with licensing the system would be prohibitive.

Therefore, it seems that the system has fallen back in the hands of DAS, from which we began.  But before DAS will build the system from scratch, we must determine conclusively that there is no other option available for purchase, an "out of the box" system.  Matt Immordino will conduct the bulk of this this research and give a report at our next meeting.  In addition, the administrators included in the council reach out to our institutional peers through Ivy Plus, a communications network between univeristy administrators, to consider what other universites are using.  By comparison, I will reach out to the students at other universites through the Ivy Council, a similar student consortium established between universities.

We plan to have our next meeting during the week of June 22nd.