College culture is built around the daily use of the Internet. Students use it to check their e-mail, do online homework, check account balances, read the day’s news and even pay tuition.

But in most Illinois counties, students cannot use the Internet to help in their quest for an absentee ballot.

According to an I-ELECT survey of students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 41 percent of students plan to vote in their home counties. But in order to do this, students must either travel home on Election Day or obtain an absentee ballot, which would allow them to cast their votes away from the places in which they are registered . Finding an absentee ballot is something only 38 percent of students surveyed know how to do.

States such as Wisconsin, Kansas, Texas and Minnesota have simplified the process by making the application for absentee ballots available online.
Voting absentee in Illinois takes more effort. In Illinois, voters must travel to their county clerk’s office to fill out the absentee application form or call to request one. Then they must send the application back to get a ballot.

After searching the Illinois State Board of Elections’ Web site only to find out the application wasn’t there, Molly Cornyn, a junior at the University of Illinois, became frustrated.

“If I couldn’t find it here, I probably just wouldn’t (request an absentee ballot),” Cornyn said. “If it’s online, you can do it at home, you can do it at school, whatever. But if it’s not, you have to put a lot more effort into it.”

Cornyn and four other students were asked to search the Illinois State Board of Elections’ Web site for an absentee ballot application. The Web site only offers directions on how to vote absentee in Illinois and tells users to contact their county clerk.

Macey Briggs, a sophomore at the University of Illinois, searched the Web site for about five minutes until she found something, which turned out only to be the instructions to contact her county clerk.

The students found online request forms available for Kansas and Wisconsin voters to be helpful. On the main Web page of both states’ sites, links take users directly to another link for the request form itself.

“With Kansas and Wisconsin, it’s right on the front page,” said Andy Groves, a University of Illinois freshman. “So that would make it easier.”

Jesse Borjon, spokesman for the Kansas Secretary of State, said Kansas has had online forms for both voter registration and absentee voting for several years.

“We try to make voting as easy as possible,” Borjon said. “We feel like putting them online makes them very accessible for the people. Fill it out, print it off and then send it in.”

Although Kansas does not track the number of absentee voters who obtain their forms online, Borjon thinks the numbers of voters has increased because of the accessibility of the forms.

However, in Illinois, forms can differ county by county, ruling out a single online application. The state aims for uniformity, said Dan White, executive director of the State Board of Elections, but the power is in the hands of individual county clerks, said Colleen Burke, an attorney for the board.

Only 45 of the 110 election authorities have Web sites, and of those only 13 have the application for an absentee ballot available online. Champaign County Clerk Mark Shelden said putting his application online in the future would be possible, but he denounced a statewide form.

“I would see it creating an impediment to people getting their absentee (ballots) in a timely fashion,” Shelden said. “Having the state board do it is a recipe for disaster, quite frankly.”

Some students said they were dissuaded by the difficulty using Illinois’ Web site, especially when they discovered there still wasn’t an online form.

“I am a college student and I have got a lot of other stuff to do,” Groves said. “When I go online and I can’t find it right away, I’m probably just not going to worry about it.”

The state did make regular registration forms available in English and Spanish on the Web in 2003. When questioned by an I-ELECT reporter about having absentee ballots online, Burke said it was the first time she had heard the idea.

“I think it’s a great idea, and it’s one whose time has come,” said Burke. “I would encourage mentioning that when you do contact your county clerk, and also let your local legislators know that that would be a great bill for the upcoming legislative session.”It wasn’t until, however, around 1999 that the internet actually began to be recognized as a tool that held power, access and influence within the voting population.