An easy hack

Students should be able to customize their username and password when participating in elections

Finding someone’s birthday? That’s easy – just ask them or look it up on Facebook. Finding someone’s student ID number? That’s still doable – look at their ID card or any school-related form they have submitted. Congrats! You can now vote under their name in any school election.

Not too long ago, seniors voted to name the Homecoming King and Queen. A little while before that, the whole student body voted to name the new mustang statue. In a few months, students will elect a new ASB cabinet and new class officers.

The ‘voting4schools’ program, implemented last year by administration, makes voting much more efficient for everyone: students can log in whenever they want to vote, voting location is flexible and tallying up the votes is a simple task.

The flaw with the system currently in place is how the students log in. Unlike Naviance and Schoolloop logins, usernames and passwords for voting4schools are preset for students.

I am concerned – and you should be too – about the new voting procedure. I am now reluctant to give clubs my student ID number. The clubs have no choice but to ask for it – they need the information to sign its members up for competitions.

Club officers have access to the online Google Forms they send out requesting their members’ ID numbers. Therefore, they can easily impersonate me come voting time.

If the administration values student privacy as it does with publishing grades online, then it ought to push for customizable login usernames and passwords before the next school election.