Marquette Student Government's spring election last week saw 28.5 percent of the student body come out to vote — a percentage that, according to MUSG officials, was on par with previous years but not exactly worth celebrating.

"Is a 30 percent turnout good? It's certainly nothing to uncork the bottle over," said College of Arts & Sciences senior and MUSG Elections Coordinator Daniel Payette.

However, Payette said, this year's results were consistent with the results of past years, and considering "the number of candidates and lack of contested races, the turnout was at least adequate."

Though this election's turnout was down more than 2 percentage points from the last year's spring election, the numbers for this year were the third-highest out of the last six years, according to statistics provided by MUSG Adviser Jon Dooley.

According to Alex Hermanny, College of Arts & Sciences senior and outgoing MUSG president, the fluctuation in voter numbers was due to the level of campaigning and the pressing issues in the election.

"It also depends on the number of tickets involved from the start of the race," Hermanny said. "When students have been involved early because of caring about one of the tickets, they will tend to vote again — even if their first candidate didn't make it to the final election."

This election also marked the second-lowest number of ineligible votes in the last six years. Out of 2,058 votes, 33, or 1.6 percent of the total number submitted, were ineligible. Last year's spring election had the lowest number with 0.9 percent of the total votes deemed ineligible.

"With the new online system students enter the system using their eMarq username and password, which eliminates the problems of authentication and has resulted in dramatically reduced error rate," Dooley said.

The new online system was first used last spring, before which Scantron ballots were used and the number of ineligible votes was as high as 167, or 8.7 percent of the total votes, which occurred in spring 2001.

"When we used paper balloting there were often problems with how students filled in their ID number on the form," Dooley said. "If they didn't fill in the ovals properly or listed their ID numbers incorrectly their votes were discarded.

"The benefits of the new system are higher voter turnout and reduction of discarded ballots because of user error," he said.

Despite a voter turnout that was only 28.5 percent of the entire undergraduate student body, Hermanny maintained that student voter turnout at Marquette is above average.

"Many other student government officers from around the country were jealous of Marquette's system of online voting and the participation rates we've been able to generate," Hermanny said.

"We would love 100 percent participation from eligible voters," he said. "However, when less than half of our nation votes to choose the leader of the nation it is not necessarily surprising that we have a hard time convincing everyone at Marquette it's worth their two to three minutes to cast a ballot."