Rest in peace, independents. Moochfish, Douglow, we hardly knew
ye. And it seems no one else did, either.
Thursday night marked the sad end of five of the six
unaffiliated candidates running in contested races. Three of the
five posed serious threats to the slate machinery.
Peter Bautista, an in-house candidate running for Financial
Supports commissioner, lost to an outsider despite having superior
qualifications and a passionate vision for the office. Doug Ludlow
and Michi Kono each took respectable shares of the vote, but
couldn’t compete with slate heavyweights. (Arash Mozayan and
Jonathan Cohen didn’t offer much to consider to begin
with.)
Then there’s the puzzling situation of number six: Darren
Chan.
Chan, an independent candidate for internal vice president,
pulled down nearly 25 percent of the vote and managed to squeeze
into a runoff.
What? Why? How? Was it the baseball cards? The Vote Darren
imitation-Von Dutch T-shirts? His platform certainly wasn’t
it.
All in all, the soundtrack to this year’s undergraduate
student elections is spinning its final tune, and it sounds like a
dirge to the romantic idea of running slateless. It’s back to
the crew team for Douglow and a return to the MyUCLA forums for
Moochfish.
If any student with a credible campaign was thinking he or she
might be able to go it alone, this election proves the prospect is
dead ““ and that’s reason enough to mourn.