Voting began today for the four posts available in the 2012 Bangor Students’ Union Sabbatical Elections. This is the first year that the vote is being held online and the website went live this morning at 9am. All Bangor University students are eligible to vote and have from now until polls close at 14:00 on Wednesday 21st March.
To ease the transition to online voting there are physical voting locations as well. The main ones are Students’ Union, Main Arts Reception, Adeilad Deiniol & Bar Uno. These will be open and staffed 9-5 today and tomorrow and on Wednesday 9-12. There will also be additional stations at Maes Glas & Neuadd Arfon today and tomorrow 6-7pm. If you’re unsure how the elections work and want to have a chat with someone before placing your vote the visiting one of these locations would be the best option.
There are four paid sabbatical posts in the Students’ Union comprised of a President and three Vice-Presidents. You can find more about what a sabbatical officer is in the video put together by the SU (see below). We also highly recommend reading over candidates manifestos and you can find all of these on http://www.bangorstudents.com/elections/ [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6CB4i_G_-E&w=350]
The voting system as with previous SU elections is the Alternative Vote (AV) system where you rank the candidates in order of preference with 1 being your first preference. Second, third and fourth preference can be very important in AV if no one candidate gets more than half of the 1st preference votes. You can just vote for you first choice though and leave the other preferences and equally if you don’t like any of the candidates you can vote to Reopen Nominations (RON).
Since all of the voting takes place online the results are expected this year a lot sooner than in previous elections. It was not unknown for results to be announce way past midnight of the day polls closed. This year it is hoped that the results will be announced by 3pm on Wednesday (21st). You can tune into Storm FM to hear the results announced live and they will also be published online at the same time.
