Week 5 – Democracy at UBC
As we all know, or more accuratley, what some of us know, the UBC AMS elections occurred this past week. The elections are an admirable attempt to make the relationship between the student body and the UBC administration more democratic, allowing anyone with a CWL to cast their vote as easily as it is to log into the system and click a few buttons from the comfort of your home or starbucks. Issues range from the new SUB, rising tuition fees, administration of the student newspaper, the U-Pass, and most importantly, the Whistler lodge (which may be sold). Presumably all these issues are important to the student body, some more than others, but you would be hard pressed to find a student who had none of these as concerns. I submit to you then, anyone who is reading this, did you vote? If so, then hooray for you. If not, why not? It was exceedingly easy for you to do so, you probably spent more time on facebook during your morning class than it would have taken to vote. There are posters everywhere, it is hard to miss the fact an election is happening, and if you’ve been at UBC for a while you should know they happen every year. You don’t even need to cast a vote for candidates themselves if you don’t know them, you can only answer the referendum questions. (say NO to selling the whistler lodge). Why again didn’t you vote?
Apathy. That is what the election strategy was, reducing voter apathy among people who know you personally or people who may vote for you given the chance. At a base level, it wasn’t a clash of ideas over certain issues, it was a clash of who could mobilize a larger number of students, not necessarily convince them. This is a result of extremely low voter turnout. The 2012 AMS elections saw some of the lowest turnouts, according to an AMS elections article. When turnout is this low, simply getting people to vote is more effective than championing one view of certain issues.
This was clearly demonstrated by this article: http://ubyssey.ca/elections/2012/01/27/which-bog-candidates-supporters-were-campaigning-with-a-laptop-in-totem/
Campaigners for Silley, realizing this strategy was effective, were patrolling common rooms with a laptop and internet connection getting people to vote, or voting for them. These were people who wouldn’t have voted anyways was the rationale. Likely most had no idea what they were voting for, and just wanted to be nice and do a favour for the friendly people with the laptop. I think I will find little disagreement among you that this is not ideal democracy.
And neither is this! http://ubcstudentmedia.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/ams-election-fraud-2010/
Basically this is confirmed widespread electronic voter fraud for the AMS elections of 2010. People were able to exploit a loophole in the programming and cast as many votes as they pleased. The results favored some candidates by a wide margin. No re-election was done. The article suggests that this has been happening for years. Democracy? Not by any definition. Definitley not mine.
Maybe this is why people are apathetic about AMS voting. If people can manipulate the results, if it is nothing more than a popularity contest for mobilizing voters, then why vote?
I didn’t vote.
