USI Funding Preferendum: Day One Error Statement

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Funding Preferendum 2012 Day 1 Update by the Union of Students in Ireland To Whom It May Concern Some issues have been raised by students, Students’ Unions and graduates about the voting process in the online USI Funding Preferendum. USI would like to clarify the following issues. It should be noted from the outset that the system used for authentication is not software designed for or by USI and is provided by HEAnet, see below for more information. How the process works. The process for students voting is; a student logs on to www.usi.ie to cast their vote, they select their college, they are then transferred over to a server in their college where they enter their username and password as if they were logging into a computer on campus. Their college then checks if they are a current student and provides this along with a unique identifier, not related to their student number, and transfers the student back to the usivote.com server to allow them to vote if, and only if they are a current student. The unique identifier is used to ensure that the student can only vote once. It is important to point out that USI receives no personal information about the student at any point in the process as all verification and generation is carried out by the students’ own college on their servers. Graduates being able to vote The process outlined above is a tool called Edugate, provided by HEAnet. HEAnet is the IT infrastructure provider for all Irish Higher Education Institutions, the Public & Civil Service including Government Departments and Leinster House. HEAnet provides Edugate for a number of purposes including verification of student status used to operate campus car parks, education discounts on computer products such as the Apple Education Store Discount, online voting in a number of colleges and the ability to access computers and IT services in another college’s campus. Each individual college maintains its own database of current students, i.e. the same database used for registration, examinations etc. It has transpired today a small number of colleges have not kept their databases up to date and this has allowed some recent graduates to cast a ballot. As part of the Edugate system each college is required to keep their database up to date. Only each individual college has access to its own database.


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USI Funding Preferendum: Day One Error Statement by Maynooth Students' Union - Issuu