More Election Illegality! (But Who’s Counting?)
Sometimes I get the sneaky suspicion that Election Council Chair Wren violates the bylaws just for the fun of it…
ASUC Bylaws, Title 4, “Elections”
17.4 Incentives for Voters
A ten (10) percent discount on items including textbooks shall be given to all persons who vote in the ASUC election. This discount shall be good for the remainder of the semester. The Elections Council Chair shall work with the ASUC Store Operations Board or their designates to develop the format of the discount slip. [emphasis mine]
Coupon Distributed to All Voters
okay….voting is in spring…booklists for the next semester are not out until the summer….therefore it is really fucked up to make that end at the semester when people should really be able to use them for the first few weeks of the fall semester so they can buy their books. the logic behind it all is ridiculous.
Comment by Anonymous — April 26, 2006 @ 7:58 am
More reasons why we should abolish the ASUC
Comment by DTI — April 26, 2006 @ 10:00 am
What do the bylaws say about the free Gelato upgrade?
Comment by Donald — April 26, 2006 @ 10:51 am
The by-laws don’t specifically exclude it, as far as I can tell, so it’s at the discretion of the EC, but a case could be made that such an action violates equal protection of candidates and equal voting rights.
Comment by Beetle — April 26, 2006 @ 10:59 am
One thing the gelato coupon does is throw off the popularity of online voting - I only voted on campus to get the coupon, which isn’t available online.
Comment by Anonymous — April 26, 2006 @ 2:26 pm
How do we get this slip? I didn’t see any mention of it after voting online? Maybe I wasn’t paying attention. Oh well.
Comment by Jim Fung — April 26, 2006 @ 2:42 pm
1 lawsuit later…
Gee, I was only joking about the Gelato.
Comment by Donald — April 26, 2006 @ 11:15 pm
This is reposted from a comment I made on livejournal, but I thought CalStuff readers might be interested in it.
A brief guide to the ASUC elections:
The Elections Council holds a kickoff meeting where they distribute copies of the bylaws and go over the rules for campaigning, and explain how many major and minor censures are needed to get kicked out of the race.
Each ASUC party takes its copy of the bylaws home and scours it for grey areas that may be abused with, more or less, impunity. Next, they strategize to see precisely how many actual infractions they can make without actually being disqualified. Read on to see why this number is higher than the number of censures required for disqualification.
The elections take place. ASUC politicos can’t figure out how to save documents in open formats like plaintext instead of proprietary Microsoft Word .doc files, much less set up and maintain a web based election server and a campuswide network of computer polling stations. Consequently, the ASUC ropes one of the student computing groups on campus, e.g. the Open Computing Facility (OCF), the Computer Science Undergraduate Association (CSUA), etc., into running its elections for a pittance.
Before the votes can be counted, each party or candidate has the opportunity to file suits claiming that everyone else cheated and should be disqualified. The ASUC Judicial Council adjudicates these suits. There is precisely one area where parties and candidates show even more incompetence than they do when hiding their chicanery, and that area is ferreting out the mischief of other parties and candidates. Hijinks ensue. Once in a while, a candidate is disqualified. On rare occasion, an entire party is disqualified. Usually this results in more hijinks. This entire process eats up time and money that could be used for other petty purposes like improving the lot of the student body.
At last, the votes are counted, and the next year of ASUC candidates advocate for useful initiatives like the one shown for most of the Spring 2006 semester on the ASUC homepage:
If blogsome doesn’t like image tags, go here:
ASUC Home Page with Petition for Left Handed Students
Once upon a time, long before anyone in this thread was born, the ASUC joined with the student body in a chorus of unified voices to advocate for important issues like free speech and civil rights. Unfortunately, this doesn’t happen anymore because, in the last four decades, the campus population grew more diverse, and the number of important issues we are passionate about skyrocketed. Sadly, the yahoos in the ASUC don’t get that you can’t take the pulse of a highly diverse campus, never mind effectively advocate for the plethora of meaningful causes its students believe in by using the same political organizing techniques that worked in the 1960s.
Eventually, the ASUC will get hip to the net, and students politics as usual will be obliterated. If it happens sooner, political hacks will collaborate with hackers, and the results will amaze and inspire us all. If it happens later, hackers will tire of being pushed around by clueless political hacks, do it themselves, and as the political hacks turn to wipe the steamroller imprint off their suits, they will notice the dinosaurs and say, “What happened?”
But that’s all just a prelude to the interesting question:
What happens when the fresh, young idealists who will use the net to reinvent student politics at Berkeley unleash the techniques they will develop on local, state, and national politics?
I don’t know the answer, but I wait with baited breath to find out.
(Dan)
Comment by Daniel C. Silverstein — April 27, 2006 @ 5:08 am
Also look at the expiration date of the coupon 5/19/06. Even if the coupon was good for textbooks that wouldn’t be nearly enough time for students to buy all their books for next fall (if they even have finalized their schedule by then).
The only people the coupon could even help if it did cover textbooks would be those enrolled in summer courses which if I had to guess cuts out a large percentage of the voters.
Comment by Greg S — April 27, 2006 @ 8:20 am
lol @ dan. m@n u r sad s0n. do u really tink any of dese aSuK clownz r gonna have any political career beyond sum student aSuK post? d@ electionz techniques used in dese electionz are high school m@n.
“I don’t know the answer, but I wait with baited breath to find out.”
lol keep readin dose danielle steel novels. smashT. dey is helpin out ur writin!
“another newb another crushT kid”
Comment by smashT — April 27, 2006 @ 8:30 am
Nope. Not the current crop of jokers. But I’m not talking about the current bunch of yahoos, I’m talking about the folks who finally get it.
And, B351|>35 TR011||G 33|| //3/|
Comment by Daniel C. Silverstein — April 27, 2006 @ 4:17 pm
[url=http://payday.usa411info.net/]Payday[/url]
Comment by payday — May 2, 2006 @ 4:40 am