It has been a week since the UTSU elections. Let’s take a look at my predictions and see how they compare with the unofficial results.

‘Winner’: Unite For Action (UFA)

Wow! Really? Who would’ve guessed?

Sarcasm aside, the UFA executive candidates took home an average of 80% of votes. I really hoped VP Internal candidate Nathaniel Tang would have drawn more votes but alas, he ended with just 22% of the vote. Obviously, the uncontested candidates had no trouble ‘winning’ their positions.

Why did this happen? There could be a few reasons:

• Only one slate was up for election;
• Part of the student population was boycotting the election;
• Few eligible voters were aware there even was an election.

Obviously with just one slate, there can only be one winner. No matter how one votes, at the end of the day someone has to be sitting in that position, and, for the nth year in a row it is the incumbent slate. Does this count as winning, or does it count as ‘winning’?

Voter Turnout: Virtually Non-existent

Voter turnout was a meager 5.45%. Wait. What? Approximately 3,000 people voted. That’s about the size of a high school. Needless to say, for a school of around  55,000 people that’s just sad.

Part of the reason why so few votes were submitted had to do with a group of students encouraging others to boycott the election. I realize that boycotting an election is meant to make a statement and promote awareness, but without the appropriate media coverage it is simply a joke. No one knew about the boycott, and even if they did the numbers don’t lie. UFA would still have won. The boycott just faded because it was not documented in a meaningful way.

Another reason why voter turnout was dismal was because few people knew about the election itself. I remember last year, when there was serious competition going on, being terrified of getting bombarded by campaigners along St. George, in front of Con Hall, around the libraries… you get my point. They were everywhere. Not just the candidates, but all their supporters. I was mobbed every time I wanted to get a hot dog. They pestered me every time I finished class. Walking anywhere was annoying because a wave of people would be coming at you. This was simply non-existent this cycle.. It felt like UFA copped out because they knew they were going to win. No matter how many people voted, someone needed to be at the helm of the ship we call UTSU and they knew it. Whose fault is it for this year’s lack of  votes? During the campaigning and election period, I pinned the blame on the organizers of the election.

Is my assessment really fair, or is it another case voter apathy?

The results were frankly, disappointing. I was hoping that the only race was actually going to be, well, a race. I was also hoping for more spoiled ballots (only an average of 4%) or “no” votes (17%) from those who chose to do something other than glare meaningfully at the polling stations. I definitely was hoping for more than 3,000 votes.

We have been touted since youth as the future of society. How the world runs is going to be up to us in about 10 years.  Aside from being analytical, it also means that we find more reasons to complain. What does that mean in the context of this election? Well, for one, it means that while there are a fair number of people who complained about how UTSU hasn’t done anything for them, there was (obviously) even more people who didn’t care enough to vote. Even when you factor out those who were actively boycotting (284 according to their facebook page) and people who just couldn’t make it, you simply cannot account for the other 52,000 people who didn’t go into a polling station.

Come on, guys — do you not know or do you not care?

What did UFA say they would do again?

The unofficial (and totally unoriginal) victors of made some promises. Question is, do most of you know what they promised? We know that they fought for and won our post-secondary metropass, and that they started a free commuter brunch program. During their campaign, they relied heavily on their past achievements and the fact that they were diverse. Since it seems as though they’ve already taken down their website I’ve taken the liberty of copy and pasting part of their promotional video description off of Youtube so that, you know, we have something to look back at before they remove that too. Unfortunately, it’s not detailed.

“THIS YEAR, WE WILL TAKE ACTION TO”:

• Fight to eliminate flat fees and combat program cuts
• Work to end differential fees for professional and international students
• Defend the TTC student metropass and lobby for token and ticket discounts
• Call for all parties to drop fees, increase student grants and expand OSAP eligibility in the upcoming Ontario election
• Fight all forms of discrimination and oppression on campus
• Lobby to stop the sale of bottled water on campus and for U of T emissions reduction targets
• Increase funding and resources for clubs and levy groups
• Work to secure sporting discounts for Maple Leaf Sports
• Increase UTSU bursary funding
• Launch “Go Blues Go” campaign to support Varsity athletics

On paper, these all sound amazing, but they’re very vague. Whether or not they have any concrete plans to implement and promote these goals is another question. Some of us were already not impressed with one of the vice presidents, and I stand by that. I’ve also said that, save for president-elect Danielle Sandhu, none of the VP-elects seem to do well under pressure, especially when asked to state their platform. There was a comment on blogUT where a reader noticed that VPs Corey Scott and Shaun Shepherd were unclear in just exactly how they plan to fulfilling their platform promises and plans. Remember VP Clara Ho’s plan “to do research” and “be constructive”?  Let’s hope they pull through and do just that.

I wasn’t just trying to be witty when I said “United for Inaction”

If you’ve read everything I’ve written, you can probably tell that everything seems to center around “inaction”. Voters and students were passive, candidates were  unseen, the ex-opposing slate did not support the election process. There was barely anything going on during a week that you would have expected to be quite lively. Perhaps it was exams and papers weighing down. Maybe everyone was still trying to get used to school after a rowdy Reading Week in Cuba. It just seems that the timing was extremely unfortunate. I watched my friend, who was running as a college representative, struggle to get nomination signatures because more than half the nomination period was during Reading Week. There was talk of changing that, but obviously nothing happened.

Would it have been different if nomination and campaigning weeks were different? Maybe. If nominations were the week after Reading Week, there would have been a higher chance of another slate running as StudentsFirst withdrew because of an insufficient number of signatures. Campaigning the second week back (last week) would have been more meaningful and, ultimately, more people would have known about the elections. There are higher powers than just the executive board of UTSU running the election and this was something they should have considered.

Whatever the reason, everything amounted to one of the most uneventful UTSU elections I’ve ever seen. Inaction, indeed.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 9:00 am and is filed under On Campus, Opinion, Politics, We've Got Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.