IIM-A holds first online polls to elect campus students body

Premier buiness school, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) said that it conducted its first ever online elections yesterday, to choose representatives for its first-year student body posts.
Conducted by IIM-A's elected student body, the Students' Affairs Council (SAC), the elections involved first year students voting to select candidates for various portfolios like cultural representative, batch representative and sports representative, an official statement said today.
Developed by the Computer Centre Committee (CCC) of IIM-A, the online platform was an unprecedented success with voter turnout of nearly 95 per cent for first year elections, an IIM-A spokesperson said.
"The system is a result of months of hard work put in by the CCC of IIM-A, the body responsible for providing innovative infotech solutions to the institute," IIM-A Secretary for IT Infrastructure, Anil Vishwanadhula said.

Elections in IIM-A followed the ranked choice voting system, where candidates contesting were ranked by voters according to their order of preference.
"A unique feature of this system is that, using a secure online link, voters may cross verify whether their vote had been cast for the right candidate, after the voting process," he said.

It also has an option to select 'None of the above' in case, a voter is unconvinced about any of the candidates, the statement said.
IIM-A Students' Council General Secretary Sreejit Nair attributed the high voter turnout to implementation of the new format as well as enthusiasm from the incoming batch.

"I believe that the high turnout percentage is testimony to the success of a participatory decision making process that we follow at IIM-A student affairs. Anil and his team were able to provide an efficient way to channelise this enthusiasm through technological means with the result that we were able to record such huge turnout," he said.
So far, IIM-A elections were conducted using the pen-and-paper ballot method, where voters had to manually enter their preferences on a ballot paper to cast their votes.