commentary first draft

Everyone knows that voting is important, it allows people to voice their opinions and play an active role in the political system. When most people think of voting they think of standing in line some Tuesday in November and putting their ballot in the box. Voting for the SGA elections at UCF is entirely different, all of the voting is done through the UCF website and voting goes on for an entire week. One would assume that they could vote at their leisure in the comfort of their apartment or computer lab, but one would be wrong. For the whole week of elections there is not a single building that can be accessed without having to either inform the representatives that you have already voted or that you simply do not have time right now. When you actual do have the time to vote the information you are given about those up for elections is very scarce, everyone will work to bring more money to your department for funding and scholarships and fight increases in tuition costs. How they plan to do this it is unclear, but that’s the information you get along with a list of party members running for office.
It seems that the strategy for gaining votes has devolved from giving students well organized information about individual platforms to telling everyone what they want to hear. While each party promises that they will bring more money to each department and fight increases in tuition they are not very clear on how they intend to accomplish this. Somehow everyone will receive more support in their college and yet no one will have to pay more money. I don’t think that the party representatives give college students enough credit, if we are smart enough to get into to college we are certainly smart enough to figure out that the money has to come from somewhere.
There also only seem to be two real parties running for SGA election, the UNITE ticket which has 26 incumbent members and the newly formed Building a More Functional SGA (BAMF) ticket. These two parties have a total of 86 candidates (49 UNITE and 37 BAMF) out of the 107 running for senate. These two parties totally eclipse the other candidates running for election with tents set up throughout campus it is hard for the little man to be heard. Even with these two parties fighting for votes the only real way to tell the difference between them is the color of the shirts they wear, the UNITE party wears yellow and black which bears a striking resemblance to UCF’s black and gold colors, this is most likely an attempt to gain vote through school pride, telling voters to go with experience due to their high number of incumbents. The BAMF party on the other hand wears purple and voices change and reform to the SGA. The problem is most voters don’t know what experience they are going with or what they are reforming because no one really tells us, what was the SGA like last year? Who was a member? What did they vote on? How did they vote? These are all questions that would help voters to come to a well informed decision but the answers simply are not being given. Even some party representatives will admit that many students that are voting are simply doing so to get it over with, not to elect members they show support for.
The people running the voting tents have even started giving out food to encourage people to participate in the voting process, and while the voting system is setup so that voters can voter for anyone the choose it is hard not to side with the person that just gave you a slice of pizza or a donut. While these voting tents have increased voter turnout significantly it has also drastically increased the number of uninformed voters, if you ask me I would prefer ten well informed people casting their votes to a hundred people voting based on what t-shirt someone is wearing, or the snacks they got from the tent.