It could be worse…

It appears that the Judicial Council will have a clear case docket by Wednesday, and that the ASUC elections finally seem to be coming to a close, with results to be tabulated and released hopefully by Friday.

As wacky and crazy as they seem to be, the ASUC election and governing infrastructure really isn't so bad when compared to how some other campus governments are run.

For example, let's examine the UCLA elections, which are in process now with four weeks left in their last quarter. The party system there does not work effectively at all – the parties themselves are generally short lived with an extremely low institutional history, and are often extremely detrimental to the political process. There is no senate; only twelve students control the school and its budget to student groups, making the process much more subjective year-to-year as one group can (and has in the past) monopolize power quite easily.

The only thing UCLA does seem to do right is allow students to vote from their own computers, something our Senate (CalSERVE senators in particular) has dragged its feet on. It seems that Cal-SERVE is afraid of increasing voter turnout, speculating that the party has reached a ceiling as to party voter turnout, and increased accessibility to voting opportunities could theoretically hurt their power base.

Arguments against the possibility for fraud on home-based computers are moot in light of the many problems the Election Council has had in the last couple of years with inconsistent reliability and security loopholes that, while uninvestigated by our AG, definitely compromised the integrity of the election. So much for the progressives being the champions of efficient democracy.

As long as we're on the topic of elections, kudos to the Daily Cal for publishing one of the longest "Corrections" columns in the history of printed news. I’d link it, but yeah, the site is still down. Email This Post!