Humor: The U is not a democracy
/In light of the recent Students Union presidential election, I have been doing some thinking about how our voting system works. Recently, while deep in thought, I came to a troubling realization: the StFX Student’s Union is a terrible joke of a democracy. There are several reasons why I believe this to be true:
First of all, each vote in the election is counted equally, which means that each student has an equal voice in terms of who gets voted as in president and vice president. There are no residences which have a more heavily weighted voting power than others, and there are no candidates voted in at a lower level which ultimately decide who becomes president and vice president. There is simply one vote per student, and each vote is counted equally. How is that fair or democratic? A vote from a MacIsaac student is the same as a vote from a Burke student – that just seems ridiculous to me. My suggestion to the Students Union would be to assign certain residences which have more voting power, or to have residences vote in candidates who determine the ultimate winner: that is how true democracy works.
Secondly, the voting system is easy to access, there are polling booths everywhere, and students are actually encouraged to vote. This is simply antithetical to the idea of democracy – why would we want as many people as possible to vote? My belief is that true democracy lies in making the voting process difficult so as to skew the results from the true beliefs of the population. We should be making it hard to vote, have long lines so that busy people are disinclined, and for god's sake, stop advertising the election so much! The Student’s Union is obfuscating the process of democracy with their easy access and advertising, and it is a criminal offense in my eyes.
Finally, and this may be the worst part of all, anyone can run for president and be considered equally! You don't have to be rich or have high social status, it is easy to run and the school media gives each candidate equal coverage – that's just unfair! The candidates also appear to be running without any hidden agendas within their platforms, what is that about? Even worse is the lack of corporate lobbying involved – for true democracy hidden monetary motivations from corporations are an absolute must. My recommendation would be to, at the very least, have Sodexo secretly speak with the candidates and offer them money to promote their agenda.
All in all, the Students Union is seriously deluded if they consider themselves a true democracy. I think that we need to have a serious discussion about the issues I presented here so that we can move towards a system of government that more truly resembles the beautiful and pure system of democracy which our forefathers put into place for us – the way things should be.
