Oh god. Not more of this. Did your head say that just now? That’s how I’ve been feeling these days.
But I got an e-mail from this club I’m in, CVC, about voting and it was very helpful so I think I should share.
> This is where you go to vote <
> This is where you go to find the information on the questions asked and the candidates <
After taking a look at those two pages I can see why only 15% of the student population bothered to vote last year.
There is just too much going on and not enough care in my body to bother to read all those pages about candidates and so on.
Too many terms I don’t understand.
Too many things I never knew existed.
Too little time to care.
Why am I even bothering then?
I read in the Ubyssey about this “referendum” that wants students to pay $5 at the beginning of the year and you can get it back when you vote. And you can vote against (or for) it.
So really my only motivation to vote is that I want to keep my damn $5.
(I don’t even know what “referendum” really means but they seem to be rules or policies the AMS wants to change?)
Do you really know where your fees are going? For people who miss out on voting and if this $5 thing passes I doubt most people would even realize that there is a $5 charge in our fees somewhere that we can get back through voting. Sure, it would be these individuals’ own faults for not staying updated but seems like a cheap tactic to me.
If only 15% voted last year… that 85% multiplied by $5 is a lot of money…
I will talk about my other confusions of voting another day.
(like what does “indexing fees” mean anyway!?)
For now, sleep.
mmm yeah, the $5 fee is not a very nice thing… But they do need to find a way to get more students voting!
Indexing fees means adjusting AMS fees to the Canadian Price Index… I’m not doing econ or anything, but its logic is that $100 today is not $100 in 50 years, so this is a way of keeping the real value of the money, rather than the number… I think… lol
I wouldn’t have voted either if I hadn’t wafted through pages upon pages of blogs either. There is a real disconnect between the information sources and the normal student who doesn’t check every voter-funded media blog daily here, even with something as popular as the Ubyssey. While the information is there, the translation from ams hack jargon to the average person’s understanding isn’t. And there’s just so much information to translate..But I guess this isn’t just a UBC issue.
I think Miriam is exactly right in saying this isn’t just a UBC issue. Voter turnout for provincial & federal elections in these past years has also been a bit embarrassing… the question is whether the responsibility falls on the citizen to waft through those blogs to understand or whether the hack jargon needs to tone down so the every-student can understand what is going on (without having to read endless posts on those blogs)? The answer is probably a balance of both, but how can we get both parties to meet in the middle?