UCDSU have confirmed that they will use the same voting system as last year. It is understood, however, that the problems which emerged with last year’s election have been dealt with. 

Last year’s election was disrupted when a bug in the system meant that those who voted through Instagram or Facebook may not have had their votes counted. Membership Services Ltd, the company running the election, then discovered that neither Instagram nor Facebook supported the “confirm your vote” popup message which was needed to verify students’ votes. 

After confirmation from the SU that they will be using the same company as last year, we reached out to Membership Services Ltd to see if the former issue had been resolved. The company’s Marketing Manager has advised The College Tribune that “MSL investigated a small number of instances where voters were unable to confirm their votes on mobile devices. The issue was narrowed down to users choosing to place votes via the Facebook app on devices using iOS 13.x.” 

She then verified that the issue has since been fixed: “We are pleased to confirm that MSL developers were able to quickly adapt the ‘confirm vote’ feature accordingly and the update was released to MSL’s online elections platform in June 2020.

This should reassure voters that they can safely vote online in this year’s election in the knowledge that their vote will be counted.

Rosie Roberts Kuntz – Assistant News Editor