Why attendance voting?

Why we’re voting in person this year

In an age where government services, universities, banks, job interviews, medical care and more are moving online, UMSU has made the decision to go back to in-person polling.

This might seem like an unusual decision (we’ve certainly had a few questions!), but it’s the result of a lot of thought about how elections should be run.

This year’s elections are in person, by electronic attendance (voting on devices), because we think in person polling best addresses the risks of electoral integrity. By this, we mean that in an online election, every student carries a polling place (their phone) in their pocket, and so campaigners have strong incentive to coerce students to vote there and then, or to simply take their phones and vote for them. In the 2025 election, we received many reports of this, but we suspect in most cases it happened without anyone reporting it. 

We don’t believe an election can be fair when run online, if students are coerced into voting.

If an election is close, a handful of votes can be decisive, so it’s not enough that most votes are cast fairly: all must be.

We also think these are other benefits of an attendance election:

• Polling places will concentrate campaigners near them, so that campaigners have an opportunity to fairly put their message, but uninterested students can avoid those areas
• There’s much less incentive to campaign to students in their residences, private spaces or when studying; all of which reduces the risks of people feeling unsafe or bullied
• Our staff are available to provide neutral assistance to voters

There’s a big disadvantage with in-person elections, which is that you have to show up to campus to vote. For many students, this won’t be a problem. For some (such as those on placements, overseas, on exchange, sick during election week, or studying at campuses without polling places), it makes voting more difficult or even impossible. For those students, we offered electronic postal votes, discussed below.

Note: Although these are UMSU elections, the rules are set by UMSU’s Electoral Tribunal (who are not UMSU employees), and the election itself is contracted out to an independent company, Above Quota Elections. The agreement between AQE and UMSU gives AQE independence in decision-making, governed by the Electoral Regulations. The decision about polling mode was made by the Electoral Tribunal.

Electronic postal votes

For students who are unable to attend campus during polling hours, we offer “electronic postal votes”. Electronic postal votes are sent by email and allow the recipient to vote at locations off campus, and at any time from the start to end of polling. Electronic postal votes are a modern evolution of paper postal votes, which have always been offered when voting was done on paper.

Electronic postal votes are only for students who can’t vote on campus: for example, students attending campuses where we don’t have a polling place, students on placement, fieldwork or exchange, and similar reasons. We’ll also offer late postal vote applications (after the deadline) to students who become sick, or have some emergency preventing them from attending campus, which arises after the deadline to apply.

Any student with an electronic postal vote becomes an integrity risk to the election in the same way as happened in 2025. For this reason, if you can vote on campus, you must go to a polling place to vote. We’re also concerned about the possibility of harassment, coercion or organised campaigns to steal votes from students who’ve applied for a postal vote. As well as infringing the rights of those students, this represents a threat to the election’s integrity.

Paper versus electronic

Another question we’ve been asked is why not return to paper elections. We think paper has certain advantages: you don’t need to trust us, or the electronic system at all, as you can literally see us count it. It also survives network outages, power loss, and all you need is a pen or pencil.

On the other hand, it is more expensive. Printing all those ballot papers and the extra staff time needed for counting, cost more than the costs of an electronic election, which is money that UMSU can’t use for other things. There is also the environmental cost of all that paper, even when it is recycled.

Our view is these considerations are finely balanced, but importantly, both in-person methods are secure.

A note on security

It should be emphasised that, although we have talked about security and integrity above, there’s no suggestion that BigPulse (the electronic platform) has any security problems: it is widely-used and well-secured. The problem is that, when used on a phone or mobile device, the electronic platform cannot verify the identity of the person voting as they vote, or verify that they are voting in a secluded and secure environment.

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