Bowing to pressure from student critics, student-government leaders will halt work on a program intended to track voter demographics in student elections.
The program would have gathered such information as gender, race, college house, international student status and major.
Voters themselves would not have been identified; rather, the results would have been tallied by percentages. The Undergraduate Assembly and Nominations and Elections Committee - the branches that spearheaded the program - had planned to share the data with different minority coalitions in hopes of increasing the diversity of student government.
But "many concerns have been brought to me regarding privacy," said UA Chairman and Wharton senior Brett Thalmann. "So I have decided to table the proposal to allow more discussion to take place."
Thalmann said minority-coalition leaders came to him after the UA and NEC announced the program and expressed reservations in regards to how privacy would be protected.
NEC Vice Chairman of Elections and College junior Dan Strigenz also said that while the program would not have been instituted for this election cycle, he hopes to see it used in future elections.
"I think the program is well-intentioned, but there are privacy issues," Chairman of the Latino Coalition and College junior Rob Medina said. "A better thing would be to have students self-identify."
