Victoria Alarcon
Features & Opinions Editor
@excalweb
With the end of another school year approaching, and students getting ready for exams, it’s that time of year: time for a student union election.
This year, we’re fortunate enough to actually have a choice in deciding who will become our student executives, and in turn represent over 50,000 students at York, including you. In one corner, we have the incumbent slate, York United, with familiar faces like Vanessa Hunt, Robert Cerjanec, and Alastair Woods. In the other corner, we have the opposition slate, Free York University, with fresh faces like Jonathan Jupiter, Brittany Leonard and Gaston Villagram.
For those new to York politics, last year the executive candidates were all appointed to their position after a failure to establish an opposition. There was, for all intents and purposes, no election. Last year’s theme was indifference.
The year before that, you might as well have just gotten rid of the opposition. Sixteen director candidates were disqualified because they handed out issues of Excalibur, which was seen as “unregistered” campaign material.
To make matters worse, for the last two years, the chief returning officer (CRO), who is in charge of making sure student elections are fair, has been accused of being voted in by members of the incumbent slate.
And though this year we have someone different, we still don’t know how she was appointed to her position.
It’s been a slippery slope these last few years with student elections and to be honest, the incumbent has always had an unfair advantage over their opposition.
For some reason, the student elections at York have never been about what each slate has had to offer, but, instead, what advantages the incumbents have been able to use (significantly higher budget, a year-long barrage of PR branding, and proven situations where they brought in off-campus CFS members to help during their campaign) to win the election.
With all the political mischief, a lot of the real issues at York get overlooked, like transportation costs, high tuition, and security. And if we’re constantly trying to determine how fair an election is, then we won’t be able to solve those issues.
I’m hopeful this year that nothing unjust will happen, and that maybe, just maybe, the opposition slate will finally be given a fair chance and that the incumbent slate will finally have some real competition.
Because when it comes to democracy, that’s the only way it works.
(Anything less wouldn’t be democracy.)
