Thursday, February 15, 2007
I like big butts and I can not lie
Josh Daniels apparently showed up yesterday to derail the good idea of reducing polling locations. Disenfranchisement, and all that jazz. We've heard it all before. Josh Daniels is the president of the GA. Here are some thoughts to consider:
Josh Daniels told me earlier this week that the GA was for graduate students, and the ASUC was for undergrads. Thus, he thought it unfair for graduate students to have to pay any amount of fees to the ASUC. Suddenly, though, it's important for graduate students to have a voice in ASUC elections.
Oh, wait, let me clarify that. That's ASUC elections, excepting the GA, which doesn't hold elections where average graduate students can make their voice heard. One has to wonder why, given the convenience of online voting, the GA doesn't take steps to create elections. The cost wouldn't be terrible, since the infrastructure is pretty much all there. The Josh Daniels explanation would be: "GA Delegates are too stupid to think of something like that, so we need someone like you to show up to our bylaw revision talks." My explanation would be a touch more cynical, considering what I've seen from these folks year after year.
Also exciting is the fact that the GA took special steps to make sure they didn't have to pay their fair share of voting rights. This was last year's referendum (it's okay if you don't remember this detail, either, since they wrote it to be intentionally vague). Since the GA's share of the election cost is proportional to graduate student turnout, and since the ASUC supposedly doesn't represent graduate students, wouldn't "disenfranchising voters" be a benefit for the GA? More money for them!
No, no, of course not. They're not serious when they say they want autonomy. They want more money, more control, and more votes, but not the associated costs. Now that their share of the election is smaller, they strongly support higher election costs. Imagine that.
I guess it can't be helped. Graduate students are old, and can't be expected to understand these new-fangled interwebs that the kids are using these days. Online voting is complicated and inconvenient, compared to the simplicity of finding a polling station, waiting in line, and voting hunched over an uncomfortable table, while the guy standing behind you can see your votes quite clearly. And graduate students are on campus, walking between various locations, all the time. It's not like they live far away, or only use a single building all day.
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