The process of calculating results of the Government of Student Body elections has become simpler for the Election Commission since the voting process was computerized.

“This is the third year and it’s worked beautifully,” Wendy Weiskircher, elections commission member, said. “It makes it more accessible to students.”

Having most of the results tabulated by Academic Information Technologies makes it easy for the commission to do their job, she said.

“It’s a huge, immense difference rather than having to count stuff by hand,” said Sam Umbach, election commissioner. “[When it was counted by hand], if it’s within 1 percent, you need to recount the vote. What a pain.”

This year, AIT also provided Umbach with more summaries than they have in previous years.

Umbach said the results given to him are broken down by constituency. Constituency refers to areas of residence, like Richardson Court Association, fraternities and sororities, and off-campus students.

In each constituency, individual ballots are summarized if they voted for the same person, Umbach said. Listed below that are write-in ballots, which are summarized if there are multiple votes for the same person. These votes are handled manually.

The Election Commission does not receive any personal information from AIT about anyone who votes, Umbach said.

“At no time is there an ISU ID or Net-ID associated with any given ballot. Even Academic Information Technologies can’t tell me that, which is good,” he said.

There were many concerns with electronic voting the first year it went into effect, Weiskircher said. People were worried that situations like a group of people getting together and mass voting would arise, but that has not happened so far, she said.

The only ballots handled individually aside from write-in votes are challenged ballots. Challenged ballots are those from students who don’t have a correct address or if a recent move is not reflected in the student’s ISU record, Umbach said.

This results in the students not getting to vote for the right constituency, a common problem with those in the greek system, Umbach said. Only those students living in greek housing get to vote for greek seats, which often causes confusion with students in fraternities or sororities who live in other areas.

“There are always some people that aren’t real happy,” Umbach said.

Umbach and two other members of the Election Commission go through all of the challenged ballots and check them to make sure they match up, Weiskircher said.

There were not many challenged ballots this year. As of Wednesday morning, there were 62 challenged ballots out of 4,059 total votes. Umbach said last year’s voter turnout was about 2,800.

The election results will be announced at 8:30 p.m. Thursday in the Gallery Room of the Memorial Union after the Election Commission tabulates the challenged ballots and finalizes the election results.