Homecoming, a time-honored tradition that has built itself up over the years into a complicated series of events, happens to involve the epic rearrangement of the RHS student power structure as

Homecoming Princes and Princesses make their bids for power. They campaign in an attempt to cement their position as presidents… sorry, not presidents, Homecoming King and Queen. I get the two mixed up occasionally.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the idea entirely. You aren’t about to catch me grabbing a mic and screeching out a pathetic rendition of Emily Osment’s “I Hate the Homecoming Queen” in the middle of some rally or another. In fact, I’m all for adolescents grappling for a sense of success within a position that holds no actual power. No, really – I even have it listed as my favorite book genre on my fictional Tinder profile.

This year, though… This year was different.

Not only because it was Roseville’s hundredth anniversary of Homecoming, but also because the voting system was entirely digitalized. And while I applaud the painstaking efforts students and faculty must have gone through in order to see this project through, I’m also now stuck in the unenviable position of informing them that those same efforts were unnecessary in terms of this particular change.

Maybe it’s the freshman year nostalgia that’s affecting my brain, but something about entering a classroom and hearing the scritch-scratch of lead on paper and the distinct shuffle dance of an eraser as students try to remember the names of any interesting contenders is something I miss now that the voting system is entirely online. Then again, it might also be the buggy nature of the system itself, as well as the link that led to nowhere, which two different people sent to me and I tried a multitude of times. That annoyed me to no end.

The point of being able to vote online is that it’s supposed to be easy and comfortable, and it’s a solution that doesn’t require overworked student to count out over a thousand slips of paper manually. However, at least the previous system ensured that everyone that wanted to vote was given the to and those those who were not passionate about voting would be encouraged to do so, as students went door to door and allotted each class ten or so minutes of class time to fill the ballots in.

This year, I was unable to access the site at all – and I wasn’t the only person I know who faced this conundrum. What’s the point of voting if only a some of students are expressing their opinions in a quantifiable way?

While it’s nice to see that the school is actively making attempts to modernize itself, the process still has quite a way to go before it’s perfected.