The EVES voting system is used to deliver voting and counting in high profile elections conducted across the University including General Council, University Rector, Student Representatives and Academic Affairs.

The system is currently on unsupported/obsolete technology.

•       Preparation and delivery of an online ballot for University elections is currently via Cold Fusion forms and an SQL database combination operated by Applications staff who manually prime the system with the data supplied by the election provider(s).  Both a test and live system are primed with the election data.  Cold Fusion is costly to upgrade and is gradually being replaced.

•       There are 2 election count systems used to produce the voting result, one for single seat voting and the other for multi-seat voting.  The systems are an MS Access and SQL database combination and require manual import of voting results after polling closes.  MS Access is particularly prone to failure without prior warning, despite testing, as a result of operating system or office changes.  Importantly, this can happen in situ when running a count in front of candidates and election providers.

•       Preparing the systems requires three individual teams within ISG to prime data systems, each with the same election details and this is prone to human error.

Our suggested improvement would be to empower the election provider to schedule their election(s) events, the online ballot would be published at polling time and the standard count report available when the ballot closes.