commentary

SGA Elections:
The Battle for the Misinformed Vote
As most students at UCF know the elections were recently held for the SGA senate. At first glance it seemed like a pretty good setup, all of the voting was done through the UCF website using student accounts to prevent fraudulent voting. I assumed that this meant that everyone would have the opportunity to vote at their own leisure once they felt they had received sufficient information to make a well thought out decision. Unfortunately, I was wrong. As soon as the elections had begun the campus was swarmed with tents representing the UNITE and Building A More Functional SGA (BAMF) parties. These two groups then set about hounding students to no end. On more than one occasion I was running late to class and had to stop to tell not one but two people that I simply did not have the time to vote at the moment, it didn’t make me late to class but it was an annoyance that I was glad to be rid of once the elections were over.
Once I actually found the time in my busy college schedule, I approached one of these tents with the hopes of learning what each party stood for. I was sadly disappointed when the representative gave me a two minute rehearsed speech about how his party would bring more funding to my college while working to fight increases in tuition and then handed me a list of all the candidates up for election. I then decided to check out the other party’s tent and was treated to hearing a nearly identical speech and a different list of names. Feeling that I had not received an adequate amount of knowledge to make a well informed decision I elected to do some more research on my own to see where each party stands. After finding each party’s facebook page I learned that there really isn’t that much difference between their platforms. Both parties support several key points such as organization funding, making UCF more environmentally friendly, a more lenient student conduct policy safe rides home from bars, and a more student friendly SGA.
Well since they agree on all of those issues what do they disagree on? There were only a few differences between the two parties’ platforms, the UNITE party also promised to improve parking, prepare students with flu vaccinations, improve parking ticket appeal process, and support the universal knights program. The BAMF party also supports more free printing, increased safety on campus, and bridging the gap between the Rosen college and the main campus. All in all the only points they don’t seem to agree on are probably just the ones the other party forgot about. There is however one big difference between the two parties, the BAMF party is newly formed this year and has no current senate member from its list of 37 candidates while the returning UNITE party hosts 26 incumbent members running for re-election out of its 49 candidates. Appropriately the BAMF members argue that they want to bring change to the SGA and UNITE members claim to have more experience and be more qualified for the position.
One major issue that I feel was not addressed well was the lack of information on individual candidates, they were all just names on a piece of party and apparently had the same point of view as everyone else in their party. The high number of candidate also eclipsed those running as independents, of the 107 students running 21 were not members of the UNITE or BAMF parties and I did not hear anything about them. I would prefer to know who I am voting for not what party they belong to, especially when the two main parties seem to be so close to one another.
I also saw that several of the party run voting tents were also giving away pizza and cookies claiming it as an incentive to get people to vote in the elections not for their particular party. The only problem is that it is difficult to take a piece of pizza or a cookie from someone and then vote against them, so I believe that more than a few people voted based on which party had the better snacks.
In the end I decided to vote for the UNITE party because they have been involved in the running of campus already and I like UCF a lot the way it is right now and if they do what they have promised it will only improve UCF. But I just can’t shake this feeling that is I would have just randomly clicked on any name it really wouldn’t have made a difference. If all the members of both parties truly believe everything that the party claims then there truly is no difference between any of them and its just like picking names out of a hat. While I may have done research to determine who to vote for many students didn’t, they only voted to get the party member to leave them alone or get a free slice of pizza. This means that a large number of the voters didn’t know who they were voting for, I don’t know about you but I trust the votes of 100 well informed voters than the votes 1000 people just doing it to get it out of the way. Perhaps the next time the SGA elections come around all of the voting can be done at the student union with one voting center run by an impartial third party. This would allow for members of the UNITE and BAMF parties as well as third party candidates to express their platforms to the voters without pressuring them to vote for their respective party at a party-run voting center.