With 7,266 students voting, this year's Undergraduate Student Government election brought in the highest voter rate ever.

The Nittany Lion mascot himself even cast a ballot and attended last night's election results party.

"I think it's great," said current USG President Justin Zartman of the high turnout. "I think it shows that students take USG and all the governments seriously."

Zartman said he thinks students were unhappy with the actions of this year's USG Senate and were motivated to vote to prevent the same disappointments from happening next year.

For the first year ever, all voting was conducted online at the Web site www.vote.psu.edu.

Last year was the first year for online voting, but there were still paper ballots at various campus polling locations. This year the paper trail was eliminated entirely and the only official campus polling place was a room with computers in the HUB-Robeson Center.

Qiana Jackson (senior-operations and information systems management), who voted with a paper ballot on campus last year, said she definitely liked the all-Web method better. She was able to vote from her home computer at an off-campus location, which she said was better than walking to the HUB-Robeson Center.

"It's easy. Everybody sits at their computer at some time in the day," she said.

University Testing Services ran the voting system, preventing anyone from voting twice by requiring a Penn State login to vote.

Sam Spencer, election commissioner announced the vote count to a cheering crowd shortly after midnight.

He said that there was only one interruption to the system: around lunchtime, a large number of students logged on at once to vote.

Voting was scheduled to run from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. but did not begin until after 7 a.m. because of computer difficulties at UTS.

"It's easier to count and save paper," said Milton G. Newberry III (freshman-wildlife and fisheries science). "I felt the computer method was very effective."