With the upcoming USG elections in March, the senate focused on ways to make voting easier and more popular with students.

The USG Senate has the responsibility of drafting the elections code that governs the elections and passed the Commission Officials part of the code at their meeting Tuesday night.

The commission will have six primary members, all of which are approved by the USG Senate, including the new elections technology commissioner.

The commissioner's job is mainly to work with University Testing Services to develop online voting that is easily accessible for students and will intrigue students to get more involved and to vote.

"Voter turnout is low at Penn State and by making voting easier with more locations or options, we will increase the number of voters," town senator Mike Fedor said.

The job involves making sure the system is secure and nothing fraudulent can be done, Fedor said.

The commissioner will need to make sure that a student can only vote for the senator who is running in the area where the student lives.

"This is such an important event (USG elections) and we want to make sure there are no mistakes. The technology commissioner will make critical decisions concerning voting," said Matt Roan, USG president.

Mike Fazio, senate president, said it would be beneficial to have a separate commissioner with Web background to oversee minor technical problems.

He also said the technology commissioner would be working with the voting and tallying commissioner with counting ballots.

The online voting system that was available for homecoming elections as a trial run for the USG elections, Fedor said.

The Penn State Alumni Association and University Testing Services worked together to have online voting for the senior class gift and 70 percent of the voters voted online, said Will Kerr, senior systems analyst for University Testing Services.

Most senators agreed that online voting is the route to go for the upcoming elections.

Some were even suggesting the idea of turning completely to online voting for future elections.

Kerr said that although online voters were the majority of voters, he discussed with USG that a means of paper voting is still necessary.

Some concerns were expressed about the opportunity for students to vote for specific senators more than once.

Kerr said University Testing Services are in the process of getting a file from Auxiliary Services that holds student numbers and will only allow students to vote once.

"I think it's a good thing that we're starting online voting," Roan said. "The easier we can make it to vote, the more people we can get out there to vote."

Roan said that they have talked to other Big Ten universities that use online voting and the numbers of voters at those universities has gone up dramatically.