Voting for the annual Tommie Award opened Monday for St. Thomas students, faculty and staff, and some voters may have noticed an extra survey attached to the ballot.

The survey focuses on voter demographics and is sponsored by The Division of Student Affairs. Questions for students include ones about their ethnicity, their year in school, whether they live on- or off-campus and which residence hall they live in if they live on-campus.

The Tommie Award and the exit poll survey are intended to be entirely separate, said Vern Klobassa, director of student engagement. After voters cast their ballot for the Tommie Award, they are redirected to another site to take the exit poll.

He explained that the exit poll’s purpose is “just to give us a little bit more information about who is participating in the Tommie Award process, in order for us to make sure that we’re reaching the entire university community with the voting.”

Klobassa said it allows the organizers to know what they are doing well in terms of encouraging different communities on campus to vote.

“We want to make sure we know if we are missing the mark with some specific student populations or staff and faculty populations,” Kolbassa said. “And so we know if we may need to increase marketing efforts for these folks.”

The exit survey is encouraged, but voters choose to participate or not. Klobassa said it is important to give students the choice to take the survey, but it isn’t linked to the Tommie Award vote to maintain anonymity and confidentiality.

Some students said the demographics questions were unnecessary.

When asked whether or not he felt it was necessary, junior Justin Titus said, “I guess I didn’t really think about it, but probably not.”

Sophomore Ashley Anderson agreed.

“I didn’t feel like it was necessary,” she said.

Senior Bryan Reynolds said he didn’t understand why the exit poll was included after the Tommie Award voting, but said he answered the questions and thought it was interesting.

Freshman Nathanial Binversie said he thinks the demographic questions might be used to see how many people of each race voted for each person.

“Depending on what they use the results for I didn’t really mind it,” he said. “But it would be interesting if the results were public for somebody to say, “Oh, our campus isn’t diverse enough.”

Final voting for the Tommie Award ends Wednesday, Feb. 16. Voters can choose from three finalists: Daniel Carr, Nick Kor and Miles Trump. The winner will be announced Friday, Feb. 18.

Editor’s note: TommieMedia production editor Miles Trump was not involved in writing or editing this report.

Dan Cook and Carly Samuelson contributed to this article.

Ashley Stewart can be reached at stew1177@stthomas.edu.