Which way would the presidential election swing if Penn State students were the only voters?

P.S. U Vote, a student group that advocates voter participation, is trying to answer that very question in an online poll. Penn State students have until noon Saturday to cast their vote, via the P.S. U Vote Web site, psuvote.ist.psu.edu.

Information sciences and technology professor John Carroll said he put the voting Web site together as a way to capture student opinion not just on the election, but also on online voting in general.

"It's an obvious thing to do, really, when you think about it," he said. "People are debating Internet-based voting ... for the real vote in the future, so I think it's something to think about."

While Carroll said his research is more concerned with student reaction to an online voting experience, he expects students to be most interested in seeing which candidate wins in the poll.

"I'm expecting that most people will be interested to know if [President George W.] Bush won or [Sen. John] Kerry won just because that's the kind of context we've been living in the past couple months," he said.

He said the results would be announced this weekend.

P.S. U Vote chair Benjamin Holsinger said the group has been actively promoting the Web site. "We're doing mass fliering and mailing this week with the address on it, so we're hoping that a lot of people see it," he said.

Students use their Penn State account and password to authenticate to the voting site. After selecting which candidate -- Bush, Kerry or Ralph Nader -- to elect, students are prompted to answer a number of questions related to how they get election-related information, where they fall on the political spectrum and what they think of the prospect of online voting.

Carroll said he expects that online voting will eventually become the standard for national voting, possibly within 10 years. He cited problems in the current system as the reasons a change is needed.

"The whole voting thing ... is expensive, unreliable and insecure," he said.

He said that while there are still legitimate security concerns about online voting, he thought an online system would provide a stronger link to ensure a voter's intended vote is cast.

"I think integrated electronic systems offer a better solution than the kind of grab bag, insecure, unreliable, problematic technologies that we're using today," he said.

Craig Ganoe, a human and computer interaction researcher who worked on the poll, said he hopes to have a few thousand students participate in the poll, which was activated Tuesday afternoon.

"It's been slowly increasing activity," he said. "The word's just starting to get passed around."