Dear friend,
As I told you before I’m starting to become very annoyed by the groups asking me to vote every time I walk by one of their tents. I already voted but I still have to stop and take the time to inform not one but two people who “just want a second of my time”. I was talking to another student today about the situation and seemed to have a similar perspective on the matter, he says he gets stopped at least three to four times a day and sometimes it can be very inconvenient, especially if he is running late to a class. He is in a different college area than I am but when I asked him what the different parties had promised him if their members were elected he said they promised the same thing they had promised to me, to bring more money to his department for classes and scholarships. How can they promise to bring more money to everyone when the school is in the middle of a huge budget crisis? I also asked him if he actually knew the names of anyone running in the election, I wasn’t very surprised to learn that like me he knew the name of the parties, UNITE and BAMF, he didn’t know the name of any actual candidates. It seems that both parties just slap their name on a group of candidates and clam that they all think in the same way as what they claim. This makes the voting process very blind with the majority of the students just doing straight ticket voting based on who gave the best spiel. When I asked him who he voted for and why I was relieved to hear he voted for the UNITE party because he felt their viewpoints matched his best, this was a relief because I have witnessed several people vote for one party simply because they had pizza or cookies. The party members claim that this is simply an incentive to get people to vote and not an attempt to buy votes from students, but I have to admit I was tempted to vote for the opposite party than I did simply because they had pizza and it looked pretty good. There is however a good side to all of this, it actually does get people to vote. I for one didn’t even know that UCF was having SGA elections until I was approached by one of the members on the way to class. With all the tents set up with laptops for people to vote, it only takes a few minutes per person and the percentage of people who voted is probably pretty high. If the national elections were this convenient I imagine that a lot more people would vote. I think the elections are over soon though and then we won’t have to worry about all those people bothering us.
Sincerely,
Steven Vroman