All Posts Tagged With: "elections"

The ups and downs of online polls in student elections

Photo by Cole Garside

Sarah Petz, a reporter with the Manitoban student newspaper, is disappointed that so few of her fellow students bothered to vote in last month’s University of Manitoba Students’ Union election. “At seven per cent,” she says, “the result is not very representative.” It’s not that there weren’t clear differences between candidates. There were. The Manitoban uploaded candidate interviews to YouTube and shared them on Twitter. It wrote about issues from printer breakdowns to the construction delays on the opening of the first campus pub. And yet, despite it all, only 1,900 of the 26,000 eligible students exercised their right to decide who will run the $1-million organization for the next year-long term.

But just because Petz was disappointed, don’t assume she was surprised. “Beyond a small group of highly active students,” she says, “no one seems to care.” Turnout is often low at the U of M. It’s not much better at the University of Toronto, where only 10 per cent of students voted this year, and worse at York University where turnout was just five per cent in 2011. But low voter turnout isn’t inevitable. Not anymore. At McMaster University, where students receive ballots in their campus inboxes that they can fill out on iPads, laptops or smartphones, turnout hit 33 per cent this year. That’s up from 24 per cent last year, 22 per cent the year before and much higher than the 13 per cent turnout in 2009, back before they ditched paper and pens.

Continue reading Fixing the vote

But turnout still dismal

Premier Dalton McGuinty by • JenniferK • on Flickr

Voters in Ontario, Manitoba and P.E.I. have re-affirmed their provincial governments—and all three of those governments ran on more student-friendly platforms than their main competitors.

Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario Liberals won a third term Thursday, but were one seat shy of a majority government. McGuinty got 53 seats, the Progressive Conservatives under Tim Hudak got 37 and the New Democrats under Andrea Horwath got 17. The leaders achieved, respectively, 38, 35 and 23 per cent of the vote.

McGuinty’s Liberals poured funding into universities over the past two terms, although they promised no extra base funding this time around. That’s unsurprising considering Ontario’s $15-billion deficit. What they did promise for students is the introduction of a new grant in January that will reduce tuition for full-time college and undergraduate students by approximately 30 per cent, so long as their families’ household incomes are less than $160,000. The Progressive Conservatives promised no such grants. The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance was quick to congratulate McGuinty on his win.

Continue reading Ont., Man. and P.E.I. voters keep student-friendly governments

Candidates promise tuition freezes, bursaries and grants

Photo courtesy of a.drian on Flickr

Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial NDP Leader Lorraine Michael says her party would phase-in needs-based grants to replace student loans in its first year of government.

It’s the latest — and arguably the boldest — election promise made to students by a party leader in the last two weeks. With five provincial elections this fall, leaders are busy courting student voters.

Under Michael’s plan, 8,000 students would have their tuition subsidized entirely. The program would cost $4.7-million in year one, they say.

But the NDP isn’t likely to win on Oct. 11. Corporate Research Associates (CRA), a polling firm, puts the Newfoundland Progressive Conservatives under premier Kathy Dunderdale at 54 per cent support, with the NDP a distant second at 24 per cent and the Liberals in third at 22 per cent.

The province already has the lowest university tuition fees in Canada — $2,624 in 2010-11, compared to $6,307 in Ontario. And tuition fees are a perennial issue in provincial campaigns.

In Ontario, where the Liberal party under Premier Dalton McGuinty is facing a serious challenge from the Progressive Conservatives under Tim Hudak,  the Liberals are promising tuition grants to reduce the cost of post-secondary by 30 per cent. Hudak is promising more access to student loans for students from middle class families. Ontarians will vote on Oct. 6.

In Manitoba, where there is a two-way race between the Progressive Conservatives led by Hugh McFadyen and the New Democrats under Premier Greg Selinger, the NDP promises more funding for universities and to maintain a tuition freeze. Voters there cast ballots on Oct. 4.

In Prince Edward Island, where voters go to the polls Oct. 3, Liberal leader Robert Ghiz has proposed elimination of the interest from the provincial portion of student loans, plus a boost to bursaries. Ghiz leads Progressive Conservative Olive Crane 59 to 31 per cent, says a CRA poll.

Students in Saskatchewan can expect election promises there soon. That election is on Nov. 7.

These clowns aren’t funny anymore.

During election campaigns, anyone associated with universities hears a constant rhapsody of hope and despair about student voting. Hope that this will be the year young people finally wise up and exercise their rights as democratic citizens and despair that they will probably just stay home, get high, and play Portal 2 all day.

The normal reasons cited for not voting are usually lame and easily shot down. I don’t know any of the parties or candidates, people say, but it has never been easier to learn who the candidates are and what their positions are, so that’s no excuse. They’re all the same, others lament, but a careful look at the platforms does show discernable differences on issues like, say, corporate tax cuts and public funding for political parties. And if that’s not enough, the pro-vote gang can lay on plenty of patriotic guilt-tripping: there are people dying in other countries right now to have the rights that you are throwing away!

But in a way, that’s why I don’t really want to vote this time, and I’m sure not going to be judgemental of those who choose not to. In one sense, I agree with the democracy boosters. Democracy is a fine and noble institution, born in the fires of classical thought, educated by the enlightenment, fired in the kilns of revolution and civil war, and now, at long last, buried up to its bunghole in Canadian crap.

Democracy in this country is a joke. The leaders of the three major parties are shameless hucksters, churning out policies only to position themselves favourably with the right demographics, and crafting messages they think will resonate. They are patently unwilling to debate serious public policy questions even if they were capable of it. But real positions scare away voters and that’s not how this game (and it is a game to them) is played. And so it is that our politics, devoid of authentic debate has slid quickly and unflatteringly into scandal-mongering and name-calling. Too fearful of proposing real change, political parties bicker over the smallest details of the budget which amount to how many tenths of a percent of  our money they will take and how much will they give us back.

One could, of course, vote for the Green Party, but Elizabeth May, shamblingly petite and cursed with an absurd barn-door voice, is the opposite of the other leaders. They are style without substance; she is substance without style. Still, if the Star Wars movies have taught us anything, it’s that great wisdom comes in small hilarious packages, and one could even feel good about voting for May’s Greens (as I have done in recent years) except that a cabal of TV executives won’t give her the national exposure or credibility that comes with the leaders’ debate. And even worse, her party, more than any other, is knee-capped every election by the ridiculously out-of-date first-past-the-post electoral system. And so while May herself might be a joke we could all be in on, the election results will, once again, be a joke that we’ve heard before and wasn’t that funny to begin with.

In short, the argument against voting is that it takes seriously a state of affairs that deserves only mockery. To exercise my solemn and hard-won right to vote feels wrong when the vote is counted by an archaic system that will  benefit  factionalists who only want to win, not lead, and whose only measure of right is what will sell.

So stop the patronizing insistence that students have to vote. Perhaps the better thing to do is to praise them for their willingness to protest by not voting. Maybe all these young abstainers will grow up to be adult non-voters. In time, the participation rate (whose fall is constantly bemoaned) will drop so low that governments will finally have to recognize that a democracy no one can believe in is no democracy at all.

And out of that despair may finally come a real reason to hope.

What kind of mandate does a student union president have when only five per cent of students supported them?

Last week, the Student Federation of the University of Ottawa held their annual elections. Voter turn-out was just over 10 per cent. The head of student elections told La Rotonde, U of O’s French-language student newspaper, that he was pleased with the turn-out, despite the fact that it dropped by almost 50 per cent from the year before, because he’d expected it to be even lower. He blamed the decline on a return to paper ballots and ending online voting.

The 11.5 per cent turnout is on the low side when compared to other universities but it’s not the lowest.

This was a close election; the president-elect won by less than one percentage point. And that’s what really gets me, one of the main jobs of student unions is representing students but can someone really represent a group when 95 per cent of the members didn’t vote for them?

Tuition keeps rising despite street protests

Today, students in Montreal set off smoke bombs in the offices of Quebecor, a large media and retail company who owns the Sun newspaper chain, as part of a protest against tuition increases. Last week students in Nova Scotia had their annual “day of action” protest against tuition hikes. In the U.K., tuition massive tuition hikes lead to months of protests.

Student protests against tuition increases are a regular event in Canada. Yet tuition continues to rise. Even the extremely large and sometimes violent protests in Britain failed to convince the government to change course.

Why? Because in electoral democracies street protests generally don’t work.

Certainly there are some times when street protests may be effective, the large protests against Canada’s participation in the invasion of Iraq were at least indicative of public sentiment and may indeed have have helped keep our country out of that war.

But they don’t help when it comes to tuition because students don’t vote in elections.

Contrary to popular belief, governments don’t have endless supplies of money, more funding for education means one of two things: taxes have to go up or something else has to be cut. The Canadian Federation of Students has made it clear that they support tax increases to fund education, while other student groups have at times called for unspecified spending cuts (I once asked a student politician what he thought the government should cut, perhaps health care or elementary school funding? He was unable to answer the question).

The fact is that government policy is shaped by the desire to remain in power, no party typifies this more than the federal Conservatives, while opposition policy is shaped by the goal of gaining power, the federal Liberals for instance. It is only those parties that have no chance of being elected, the Greens, the NDP and those parties on your ballot you’ve never heard of before (there are two communist parties in my riding now?), for whom ideology figures as anything more than an obstacle.

How do you get elected? You please the voters. Not the general public, not the people protesting in the streets but those people who are more likely to vote. This is why health care is a sacred cow, while international students are cash cows. Older people, those more likely to use the health care system, vote. International students can’t and their Canadian colleagues don’t.

For the same reason, taxes won’t go up to pay for post-secondary education, older higher-income people are the most likely to vote, while young people are the least likely.

If anything, protests are probably hurting the cause. Direct action has a tendency to preach to the converted, people who already think students are self-interested whiners aren’t going to be impressed by street theatre – it’s only going to reinforce their previously held positions.

Chanting catchy slogans along with a like-minded crowd is a great feeling but it’s not going to change a politician’s mind.

Universities are ripe for mobilization because of how fast word can spread

Megan Leslie, member of Parliament for Halifax, claims that courting voters aged 18-30 is a waste of a politician’s time and that’s why most don’t engage the youth demographic. But those who do are seeing unprecedented success.

Lets take the recent win of Calgary mayor-elect Naheed Nenshi as an example. Nenshi went from polling at one per cent to winning the election with 40 per cent of the vote in two months. Mobilizing young voters is largely considered to be the catalyst for Nenshi’s triumph at the polls — not to mention the city’s dramatic spike in turnout.

While his stint as a professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal University certainly made him a household name in the post-secondary circle, Nenshi cultivated, rather than took advantage, of this connection, realizing that students were key to election gold. In fact, a week before the election, polls indicated that support for him in the 18- to 34-year-old bracket had jumped from nine to 43 per cent over the course of the campaign.

And Nenshi’s not the first successful politician to venture down this road less travelled. Just two years ago, Barack Obama was dubbed America’s first “social media” president.

“I saw a lot of parallels between his campaign and Obama’s campaign. He was mobilizing youth, which [Ric] McIver and [Barb] Higgins were not focusing on,” Ashif Murani, a Calgary lawyer, told the Globe and Mail on Oct. 19.

Rahaf Harfoush, a social media strategist who worked on Obama’s presidential campaign, summed up their success in a CBC interview on Dec. 5, 2008:

“It wasn’t about new media; it was about the fact that the campaign gave new media the opportunity to become an integrated part of the communications campaign of a political campaign.

“I think it helped us to access a lot of people by giving them to tools to organize, to create events, to connect with each others and giving them everything that they needed, so that when they went off-line they were fully equipped — be it canvassing to talk[ing] to their neighbours.

“[Through the site] they had talking points to pass onto their families, videos, events in their area that were happening, community outreach programs in their state. Everything that we did was to connect people, because it was a movement that was fundamentally about people.”

The Q&A portion of Leslie’s Oct. 19 presentation at Dalhousie University touched on some interesting realities of a political future without youth involvement.

“There should be some people in their 20s [in Parliament], because we pass bills on pension changes unanimously and we don’t talk about post-secondary education and unemployment. These issues are dead in the House of Commons,” Leslie said.

Following Leslie’s presentation, Emily Smith van Beek told the Dalhousie Gazette that political neglect of young people will eventually cause the system to crumble. She also added that universities are ripe for mobilization because of how fast word can spread.

While there’s still much to be said about promoting ideas students can get excited about it, it’s clear there is so much more politicians could be doing to engage young voters. And the ability to engage this Everest of demographics has valuable benefits for those who can successfully harness it.

The skills you learn in student organizations apply to the “real” world also

There’s a story I like to tell about how I took what I learned from my students’ union and used it in the wider world. Years ago I registered my own website. That’s jeffrybak.ca, which I still use today. And then I started getting messages from some organization called CIRA (the Canadian Internet Registration Authority) which I had apparently joined by registering my dot-ca website.

This happens all the time. We are all members of far more things than we typically think about. Ever buy anything at Mountain Equipment Coop? You’re a member, if so. They can’t sell to you otherwise. But we often ignore the many organizations we belong to – especially the ones we joined involuntarily. That’s why voter turn out at student elections is so low. I’d wish it were higher, of course. Perhaps we could aim for 20% instead of the typical 5-10%. But we’ll never get everybody because let’s face it, students don’t show up at a university to join their students’ union. It’s not the goal; it’s a side effect.

That was the same with CIRA, for me. I wanted a dot-ca domain and ended up a member of this organization. Then they sent out notice of a general meeting, which happened to be in Toronto, and bribed members with free USB keys and a decent buffet lunch at the Royal York to attend. Sound unlikely? If you’ve ever been to a general meeting of your union, or another student organization, I bet there was food. Student organizations do the same thing. It’s hard to get people out at a general meeting. So when you need a certain number of members in the room to conduct official business (which is always the case) bribery is one sure way to go. So I showed up.

At the general meeting, I was mostly prepared to just eat my lunch, pocket my USB key, and vote as required. I know the drill. But then a funny thing happened. Someone I know from the tech community spotted me in line and he was spitting mad about proposed changes to CIRA’s bylaws. And I realized that I was doing exactly what I often fault students for doing. I’d shown up at a general meeting prepared to blindly support the proposals on the agenda. I didn’t even understand the issues. And that was embarrassing. So I started reading really fast.

As it turned out about four hundred members showed up (far more than required) because the changes were, in fact, somewhat controversial. The leaders of CIRA were changing the way they recruited and elected directors. In other words they were tampering with the highest control mechanisms on how the organization is run. And suddenly I had strong feelings about that. So I got up at the microphone and expressed those views. I ended up supporting the proposed changes, after some serious explaining from the board and in particular from Michael Geist, but not without reservations. I was still a bit suspicious.

Presidential victor disqualified for “slate” behaviour

The victors of student union elections at the University of British Columbia and Carleton University will not, pending appeals, be taking office despite winning the majority of votes in their elections.

Both candidates have been disqualified by their student unions respective elections committees. The similarities end there.

In this post, I’m going to discuss the situation at UBC.

The winner of Alma Mater Society – University of British Columbia election, Blake Frederick, was disqualified for “exhibiting ‘slate’ behaviour,” according to an email sent by AMS elections administrator.

The AMS banned slates in 2004 in the hope that it would create a more non-partisan environment at the student union. A good write-up on the factors leading to the banning of slates is available from The Ubyssey here.

UBC student politics is extensively covered by great student bloggers who have great insight and analysis of the decision. Instead of repeating what they’ve already said, I’m telling you to click the following hyperlinks (in no particular order):

• thoughts on the gathering shitstorm…, The Radical Beer Tribune (former AMS VPX Matthew Naylor)
• The Recent Disqualification and why it hurts the AMS, Maria Jogova, UBC Insiders
• The Perfect Storm, Justin Yang, The UBC Spectator

At the present time, there has not been a full airing of the evidence against or defense for Frederick in this manner. I’m not in a position to assess the validity or lack thereof in the decision by the Elections Committee to disqualify Frederick.

Based upon my experience watching AMS student politics over the past couple of years, and my knowledge of the current players, I can state there does not seem to be any partisanship in the disqualification.

The elections committee and the AMS elections administrator appear to be clean of any partisan agenda. This is important to note since Frederick is seen to be part of the vocal UBC activist community; a community which has often been seen to clash with the more centralist student body and government at UBC.

Let me be clear, Frederick is not “let’s stick it to the man and burn down society” activist. He is more pragmatic and works within the system to effect change. Frankly, if I were a student at UBC, I would have likely voted for him.

While I understand and sympathize with the motivation behind the slate ban at UBC, I do not agree with it. The slate ban attempts to address two issues that plague student politics: partisanship and the overwhelming advantage of running in a slate.

Fixing partisanship in politics? Good luck, as long as there are limited resources (and power) to be allocated in the political process, there will be partisanship. Partisanship wasn’t created by party politics and it cannot be ended by removing parties from the process.

Correcting the imbalance caused by slates in student politics is an admirable goal, but does not require a draconian ban on slates.

Instead of banning slates, the AMS should limit the amount that individual members of a slate can spend. Giving them less resources than independent candidates will help balance the playing field. The name recognition and mutual support of a slate will be counter-balanced by a lower spending limit (less posters, buttons, and other items.) for each slate candidate.

Barring that, the AMS must clarify what constitutes “slate-like” behaviour.