After postponing a bill Wednesday night to implement electronic voting for Government of the Student Body elections, members of the senate met Thursday to go over the bill again.

An ad-hoc committee on Internet voting met with members of the senate to answer questions and further discuss the bill, which the full senate debated for more about three hours Wednesday.

“I see the benefits of electronic voting as outweighing the costs,” said Rick Cordaro, UDA, and author of the original bill.

Cordaro listed the benefits as increasing voter turnout, saving money and increasing convenience of voting. “The cost, obviously, is block voting,” he said.

Block voting, or voting in groups, was the main topic of discussion at the meeting. To gain the approval of the senate, several possibilities were presented that would hinder the threat of influencing votes.

“Echoing what I’m hearing from other people, there are too many problems with unethical voting,” said Lisa Dloughy, off campus. “Peer pressure is a fact of life.”

In electronic voting, as well as with the ballot system, block voting was deemed inescapable. “I don’t see one cure-all solution to block voting,” said Alex Olson, off campus.

However, several ideas were discussed with potential of limiting the effect of block voting.

The prospect of educating students on the electric voting process would allow them to identify unethical block voting, making them less likely to base their vote on persuasion. The education would not focus on the ethics of voting; rather, the importance of every vote would be stressed.

In addition, restricting voting hours to between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., the hours most students are on-campus, eliminates the hours students are most likely to congregate and vote.

These ideas will be presented to the senate at its meeting next week in hopes of generating approval for electronic voting, although debate may still be heated.

When the motion to postpone ended discussion during Wednesday’s meeting, 23 names of senators who wanted to address the issue remained on the speakers list, said Garrett Toay, GSB vice president.

“This is discussion they can have outside the senate chamber,” he said. “This is a pretty important bill, and the information is here.”

Meeting rules do not limit discussion on bills outside senate meetings, Toay said.

Although other universities across the United States have seen increased voter participation due to Internet voting, senators at Wednesday’s meeting expressed concern about uninformed students voting under the influence of their peers.

In addition, senators brought up possible security downfalls of electronic voting, which could lead to unethical voting methods.

Also at Wednesday’s meeting, a bill to amend the bylaws to include a formalized procedure for contract negotiation and implementation failed to meet the required two-thirds majority, and three subsequent contract bills were postponed.

Because no such procedure currently exists in GSB law, the bills to ratify contracts with the Student Union Board and the Dean of Students Office were postponed. The Dean of Students Office and GSB jointly fund the offices of Off Campus and Adult Student Services and Student Legal Services, two organizations included in the tabled bills.

The bill to amend the bylaws, which was two votes short of approval, would have granted the GSB president the power to negotiate terms of the contracts “with the advice of the senate,” according to the bill. Ratification of the contracts would be determined by a simple majority vote in the senate.

“It think what it came down to is that a few senators had concerns with the interaction between the executive branch and the legislative branch,” Olson said. “I think we can rectify some of those concerns this week and introduce a new bill next week. We want to do it right.”

A new bill to address these issues will likely be presented to the senate at next Wednesday’s meeting.