I won't be able to liveblog everything, but the only fee that passed was TGIF, and the only amendment that passed was the Line of Succession. Everything else failed. More later.
Amazing. I predicted the referenda failing, but the amendments!?
In an election where 85% of people voted online from home, who the hell were all these people who voted no on letting them close down polls to save money?
I also think my prediction that no one is going to try referenda for 4 or 5 years will hold true if the percents I'm hearing (35% for both Squelch and Student Life) are true.
These are results I can live with. The only thing that goes against how I voted is the Election Flexibility amendment failing. The Greek Life amendment people completely neglected to even submit a ballot argument for their amendment, so even if it was a good idea, how the hell was anybody supposed to know that?
The Election Flexibility thing kind of eats at me.
I can totally handle having a referendum I supported fail. I mean, it was a long shot and I knew that from the start. The Election Flexibility amendment failing though suggests that the student body was incredibly uninformed about the election. People complain about the ASUC wasting money but this was a chance to save thousands of dollars at basically no cost to the student body.
The lesson here I think is that you really need the university to shove a referendum/amendment down the student body's throat or a huge campaign (or in Student Life's case, a huge campaign and a fee number much smaller than 12).
I never actually got the impression Student Action was really for the Student Life fee. Vishal sure was, but I didn't see many of the rank and file bringing it up.
I think the Student Life fee could have passed at about the same dollar amount if it was a general increase in the activity fee rather than for just entertainment groups, and if the campaign had been respectful rather than insulting people's intelligence by saying $12 is free.
"The Election Flexibility amendment failing though suggests that the student body was incredibly uninformed about the election. People complain about the ASUC wasting money but this was a chance to save thousands of dollars at basically no cost to the student body."
There was no real attempt to educate voters about this. Just a moderate amount of flyering about how the physical polls at the dorms are not used would have helped this amendment pass in my opinion. Submitting a ballot argument in the Voter Guide and starting a Facebook group is not really a campaign.
Also though, I think this gets at a lingering desire on the part of voters for the option of physical polling places, which future reformers should respect instead of pushing for all-online voting.
The campaigning argument makes sense with referenda and some amendments, but when you put something this straightforward on the ballot that benefits everyone, it's hard to imagine who's going to spend the time and money to advertise it. I mean an independent group would need to do it.
The amendment also never said anything about getting rid of the polls. It made it pretty clear that it just provided the flexibility to reduce the number of polls now that they're being used less. I don't think there's any lack of respect for the polls in the amendment; all it was going to do was reflect that 85% of people voted online even with all of the polls open this year.
Something that's not clear without a campaign is how much money would be saved by the dorm polls not being there.
I know the amendment didn't say all polls would be eliminated, only remove the special constitutional requirement to have dorm polls, but my understanding is that eliminating all polls is what is envisioned by Jessica Wren and much of the ASUC Senate. These kinds of comments, that eventually the campus will switch to all-online voting, were made when the Boalt poll and other polls were eliminated this year.
I'm not saying that my next theory is likely, but maybe voters knew about that and were actually more informed that this was the eventual plan, rather than uninformed. Also, they could have just read between the lines and inferred that having the option to take away dorm polls would add momentum to eventually removing all polls.
Anyway, "when in doubt, vote no" is a pretty smart policy for voters to have, even though they went against how I voted in this instance.
How many abstentions were there? Were they high? I'm guessing yes.
Amaris White is reporting at the California Patriot blog (never thought I'd post excitedly from the Patriot blog, LOL) that Curtis Lee is the only Student Action exec who won.
In the Senate, she says these are the preliminary results pending the upcoming hearings.
I'm really surprised. Not really at the senate numbers so much as the executive races. I really thought that if SA won the 9 or 10 seats I expected that they'd win all the executive races. Obviously I was completely wrong.
But Beetle finishing second in an exec race after finishing last in everything else is nonsense. That has to be a mistake. When stuff like that happens it makes me really suspicious.
Yes there has to be a vote glitch somewhere with that. It would make more sense if he were second in the Student Advocate race, but apparently bloggers are saying it is the AAVP race?
Any errors in the results are most likely a result of someone mistyping the key for matching numbers to names. This was the Charles Shin case. All that needs to be done is to compare the name and number that appeared on the ballot with the name and number that appears in the voter file key, and any issues are corrected.
