Wednesday, 5/14/97 On-line ballot needed to open USAC elections
to more voters Student officers have no mandate due to pitiful
turnout
By Erin Renee Deis When USAC president-elect Kandea Mosley was
quoted in The Bruin (Friday) as saying, "Students continue to have
faith in (Students First!)," and internal vice president-elect
Carol Lee said that Students First!’s victories show "how much
students saw our work and how we made an impact," I have really got
to wonder exactly which students these two women are talking about.
If they are talking about the 5,549 Bruins who actually voted last
Wednesday and Thursday, then they are neglecting the other
three-quarters of the undergraduate population who did not make it
to the polls. I’m no genius when it comes to math (I’m an English
major, OK!), but I do know how to punch numbers into a calculator.
I’ll leave the interpretation of those numbers up to the individual
reader. Work with me here. Mosley received 53.39 percent of the
vote, which sounds like the "surge" that The Bruin used in its
front-page headline for the elections Friday. But with the help of
my trusty TI-81 graphing calculator, that figures out to roughly
2,963 votes, or 12.35 percent of UCLA undergraduates. Lee, who was
part of arguably the closest race of the elections (outside of
those that went to runoffs), received nearly 2,886 votes, which is
a little over 12 percent of undergrads. These numbers can’t
accurately capture the true voice of the UCLA undergraduate
population. I am not trying to demean either of these women’s
victories or belittle the voices of those 5,549 who did vote; what
I am attempting to say is that voter turnout of less than
one-eighth of the student body is not even close to an accurate
representation of the voice of students. Am I too idealistic or
naive to hope that we could someday even get a 50 percent turnout?
(The presidential election in November got at least 46 percent.) It
seems to me that our present "fill-in-the-bubble" system just isn’t
getting the job done. As scared as I am of computers and
technology, personally, I think it’s high time for elections to go
on line. Not so long ago, the UCLA graduate student elections came
and went with a pretty good on-line response (about the same
numbers voted on line as did the "old way"). They went high-tech,
not completely abandoning the Scantron and No. 2 pencil, and made
possible the use of the Web for voting. How awesome is that? I can
send flowers to my mom, sign up for the GRE, research authors and
schedule an airline flight home with the click of a mouse, so why
can’t I exercise my right to vote on line too? And if USAC isn’t
quite ready for the information superhighway and 21st century, we
could always give URSA something else to piss us off about. Come
on, you all know midway through the quarter that you start missing
her – with URSA/USAC voting, you’d actually have a reason to call
her. This voting reform would essentially lead to campaign reform
and would, in essence, allow for an increased number of candidates
to be eligible; more students would be able to afford campaigning
costs (I don’t know about the rest of you, but I surely couldn’t
afford the $468.30 that some candidates spent on their individual
campaigns.) Web sites for candidates would allow for all students
to make informed and educated decisions about candidates when
voting rather than getting a quick sound bite on Bruin Walk or even
being neglected altogether by campaigners. Bruins could actually
learn the issues and see what candidates did indeed stand for.
Everyone on this campus has access to an e-mail account and the
Web. Campaign literature could be distributed without
discrimination and would actually stick to the issues (but that’s
another letter for another time). In this way, all Bruins could
make their voices count, not just the constituents of the various
candidates and their slates. I think that with the current method
of voting and campaigning, we are neglecting a large commuter
population, students with disabilities and those who lack the time
to vote due to class and work schedules (which includes almost all
of us who can’t afford our steadily increasing fees). The time is
long overdue for USAC to reform voting methods on this campus. Over
three-fourths of UCLA’s undergrads did not vote last week. Of the
small percentage who did indeed vote, only around 3,000 or so
actually decided who was elected. The Internet, and URSA for that
matter, should prove to be excellent arenas for more active
participation by all of UCLA’s 24,000 or so undergrads, not just
the "surge" of 5,549. Deis is a third-year American literature and
culture student. Previous Daily Bruin stories: XBallot to make
voter registration easy