So another FUSA election has come and gone and voter turnout was, as usual, pretty abysmal. Fewer than 900 of you managed to make your way down the stairs after checking your mail to spend less than a minute checking off two boxes.
This isn’t a surprise; each year FUSA candidates are lucky to drum up a third of the student body to vote. This year, in fact, students turned out in the worst number since The Mirror began tracking voter turnout in its pages (see Mirror Snapshot, page 1).
What bothers me about this trend isn’t so much that our community isn’t into politics. Indeed, strike up a conversation about national politics and you’ll get fervent reactions from students on why they hate Bush or why people should shut their traps about Kerry. In fact, I sometimes sidestep political conversation simply to avoid getting into a heated argument.
A similar discussion will come up about some elements of FUSA. Students get upset about certain issues, such as who our concert choices will be or the recent attempts by faculty to take the Levee as a faculty dining room (which FUSA members helped to derail).
But ultimately, when it comes time to put up or shut up, shutting up never happens.
Why does this happen? It might stand to reason that students wouldn’t turn out as heavily in the presidential election. Absentee ballots, having to leave campus for something other than La Salsa… yeah, there’s some energy exerted, and that flies in the face of our continual apathy. But when voting booths are in Barone… that seems a bit too easy to avoid. I voted at 6:30 p.m., and there was literally no line to contend with. I wasn’t exactly elbowing my way to the front to vote.
All you needed was a StagCard to prove your identity, and most people in the campus center already would have them on their person anyway, even if only to pick up a package or grab some eats. You show them your StagCard, they highlight your name, you pull two arrows (which I managed to botch, even though I knew who the candidates were; I initially tried to vote for both VPs), and you’re done.
I’m thankful I’m graduating this year, because one of the few things that regularly irritated me on campus is when it comes time for the concert announcement, people voice their annoyance on the choice of performer. The voter turnout proves that if people really cared, they’d actually give up a short moment to make their voice heard.
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