Mention electronic voting and you are likely to hear people fret about fraud, worry that their ballot may not be counted, or insist on having a paper trail.

The Academic Senate had none of those concerns June 7 when members considered electronic voting instead of mail for senate elections. Such votes are infrequent: none this academic year, and three last year, including a no-confidence vote against the chancellor — a move that the senate rejected.

The senate's Representative Assembly gave overwhelming approval to the electronic voting system, but not before members got worked up over a mechanism that would show how many people had voted within individual departments.

"I'm coming from a country where the Mafia controls the voting exactly through a scheme like this," said Quirino Paris, a professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

No one would ever know how people voted — the electronic system is "totally anonymous," said Professor Jay Helms of the Department of Economics. He is chair of the senate Committee on Elections, Rules and Jurisdiction.

But, take the no-confidence vote as an example, and say it had gone the other way — that the senate had indeed lost confidence in the chancellor. And say he looked at the voter turnout data, and speculated that a strong turnout within a particular department meant a fair share of votes against him.

In what he later described as a "tongue-in-cheek hypothetical," Professor Jim Chalfant of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics said the administration could use the voter turnout information against a department, say, when allocating resources.

But such concerns demonstrate paranoia, computer science professor Matt Farrens said by e-mail after the meeting. "It's particularly galling as a faculty member — we are supposed to take an educated, enlightened approach to things," he wrote.

Chalfant, also by e-mail after the meeting, admitted: "I don't think anyone has ever been in a position to punish units for voting, or to attempt to intimidate them."

But, he added, "There's just nothing to be gained from having such data, and it does compromise confidentiality" — particularly for small departments.

Farrens, however, said the information could be useful. He explained that the senate leadership might want to identify departments that perhaps are not participating as fully as they should in senate votes, and therefore may need a reminder about the importance of UC's system of shared governance — whereby the faculty governs with the administration.

"By looking at a report containing turnouts for different departments, the chair would be able to target his-her educational outreach efforts," Farrens wrote by e-mail. "Why waste time giving a rah-rah speech to a department with 90 percent voting turnout? However, the groups that have turnouts less than some value (say, 15 percent) would be prime candidates for focused outreach and educational efforts."

The voter turnout data showed up as a chart during a display of the senate's electronic voting system. Helms said his committee never intended to include the voter turnout mechanism.

Farrens spoke up in favor of it, though. But no one seconded the motion, so it died.

Next the senate considered this wording: "The only report that shall be generated is the overall result of the vote." This proposal received a second, and the representative assembly voted as they always do — by raising their hands and displaying numbered, colored pieces of paper that signify each member's right to vote.

Now, here is where the electronic voting system would have come in handy.

Senate officials surveyed the raised hands and colored pieces of paper and declared the vote as follows: 31 yes, seven no, three abstentions. Motion passed.

Hold on! Someone asked, "Do we have a quorum?" That would be 50, declared an Academic Senate staff member. Yet the motion garnered only 41 votes total.

Chair Linda Bisson said that at least 59 members had entered the meeting and picked up their numbered, colored pieces of paper. (The Representative Assembly comprises 111 members, all but two elected by unit; the nonelected members are UC President Bob Dynes and UC Davis Chanceller Larry Vanderhoef).

Some members left before the vote, but maybe there were still 50 in attendance and some had not raised their hands to signal yes or no — or even to abstain.

So Bisson proceeded to count the membership … 47, 48, 49 … one short of a quorum.

But wait! "You know what? Me, I'm number 50," Bisson exclaimed, realizing that she had forgotten to count herself.

So, with a quorum in place, the previous vote stood — the only report to be generated from a senate election would be the overall results.

Next the senate voted on the electronic voting proposal in its entirety, and it passed 43-4, with one abstention.

The system will be less cumbersome and less expensive, Helms said.

Costs of voting

Gina Anderson, executive director of the Academic Senate, said the voting module came with the MySenate software, purchased from UC Santa Barbara for $5,000.

That compares with the more than $10,000 that the Academic Senate spent in one year alone, 2005-06, for three elections — mostly for printing and mailing.

Of that amount, the no-confidence vote cost $5,150. Staff time worked out to $1,050, and printing and mailing to $4,100. Why so much for printing and mailing? Because senate bylaws dictate that the ballot must include every pro and con statement from the membership.

Altogether, the no-confidence ballot numbered almost 100 pages. The senate office mailed this package to 2,513 eligible voters, including emeriti.

And how many ballots came back? The senate reported 1,054 valid ballots — for a voter turnout of 42 percent.

Senate officials figure they will see an increase in turnout with electronic voting, simply because of the ease.

Each member's MySenate home page will include an alert for pending elections, and guide the member to a secure voting site. Once a member has voted, the message will disappear from the member's home page.