+74% turnout and zero disputed ballots for a university SRC election

The situation

Four consecutive elections had ended in a petition. Not because anyone had proven fraud, but because nobody could disprove it: the ballot boxes were counted in a hall, the tally sheets were photographed on phones, and every losing camp had a plausible story about the gap between the two.

Turnout was the other half of the problem. On a campus of roughly 21,000, a contested SRC presidency was being decided by about 900 people who happened to walk past a polling table between 9am and 3pm.

What we set up

The electoral commission wanted two things that usually pull against each other: open the vote up, and make it harder to game.

• One ballot per verified student. The roll was uploaded from the registry; a ballot required a matching index number plus an OTP to the number on file. No roll match, no ballot — and the roll was published for inspection a week before opening.
• A 36-hour window instead of a 6-hour one. Turnout in a campus election is mostly a function of whether voting collides with lectures. It does, so the window was widened until that stopped mattering.
• Results sealed until close. Live tallies change behaviour in a contested race, so no one — including the commission — could see running totals. Everyone got the numbers at the same moment.
• A per-ballot receipt code. Each voter got a code confirming their ballot was recorded, verifiable against the published total without revealing how they voted.

What happened

8,600 ballots were cast against a previous high of roughly 4,900 — a 74% rise on the last comparable election, and nearly ten times the number that decided the presidency the year before.

The result was published four minutes after close. No petition was filed.

The commission's own read on why is worth repeating: it was not the technology that ended the disputes, it was that the roll was published in advance. Every camp had already agreed on who was allowed to vote, so the only remaining question was arithmetic — and that part was never really in doubt.

"We stopped defending the count and started publishing the roll. The arguments went away."

What we would do differently

The OTP step cost us voters. Around 300 students started a ballot and never finished, and the drop-off clustered on numbers that had changed since registration. A roll-update window before opening would recover most of them.

Reading this for your own election

If your election is contested, spend your effort upstream of the count. A published, challengeable roll converts "we don't trust the result" into a specific, answerable question — and a specific question is one you can actually close.