The elections for the Government of the Student Body are over and, if you’re like us, you’re thankful that your Twitter and Facebook pages are not cluttered with the get-out-to-vote campaigns of the candidates and their surrogates. What voters may not have realized, however, is that there is a complicated election code by which candidates must abide and that governs the website students use to vote, along with all the campaign rules.

Like any document, the election code can be improved. Although the next election is a year away, there is no time like the present — when the shortcomings of the immediate past are still impressed upon everyone’s minds — to adjust the rules for the next bout of electioneering.

Reforming the election code came to us when we heard that the community advisers in a residence hall (of which one editorial board member, Mackenzie Nading, is one) would be fined if they established a voting station with a few computers on March 11 and 12. By our reading of the election code, that pronouncement is wrong. Section 12.9 states: “Candidates shall not actively provide any computers or communication devices to potential voters or actively campaign to students using University-owned or personally owned computers or communications devices during the period that voting is open.”

But then, if a provision exists that prevents non-candidates from providing computers to students in the model of the polling locations used in every other election in this country, it should be changed as well.

Preventing inherently partisan individuals from providing the mechanism to vote makes sense; what doesn’t make sense is seeking to increase voter participation to a whopping 15 percent of the student body, yet preventing students from setting up hubs in convenient locations where they can set their backpack down for five minutes, vote and go on their merry way.

One potential worry is that voters could be exposed to campaign influences while voting. States have solved this problem for other elections. By Iowa law, activities that the GSB election code would define as “campaigning” must not be done within 300 feet of the entrance of a polling location. Since the election code already states that campaign materials must be removed from all university-owned buildings by 11:59 p.m. of the night before the polls open, that wouldn’t be a problem.

Nor would paying poll workers be much of a problem, either. GSB’s budget certainly isn’t huge, but paying a few students minimum wage (or slightly better) to staff polling locations from, say, whenever the dining halls open for breakfast until whenever they close after dinner would not be the most expensive thing in the world.

The main issue, however, is voter participation. When voting is based on whether an individual decides to open up a computer and go to a website, as opposed to a matter of walking to a central location where you can get an “I voted” sticker, it is easy to neglect or ignore the election until it is too late to cast a ballot. Placing a few polling stations in high-traffic areas, such as the dining halls, the Memorial Union, and the library, for example, probably would ensure that more students voted.