The polls are now open and you can make your choice among the various candidates on offer. Of course, student councils always seem a lot harder to choose your votes than normal elections because we don’t have months of coverage, events, and policy debates beforehand. But for most of us, do we really pay attention to that stuff anyway? After all, a Princeton University professor found that giving random people a choice of two candidates from an election race in another state, candidates that they didn’t know anything about other than the photo, people would choose the candidate that got elected about 70% of the time.
First impressions, as they say, are everything.
But, since we’re university students, it’s expected we’ll be more critical or discerning than the average and take into account as much information as we can about the candidates before making our choices. So, before you vote, take a look at all the information that’s available. Some of the candidates have been interviewed in our minds we meet column. Some of them took part in the candidate interview, and they all have some information over on the AUSU site and in the app. Take in as much of that information you can to find the candidates who best represent you, and who represent you the least, and use that information to cast your votes.
And that’s one of the other things that makes student council elections different. Unlike our normal federal and provincial elections, you can pick more than one candidate. It’s surprising how often students choose not to pick as many choices as their allowed, because even if many of the choices don’t seem particularly better or worse than the others, I find I can almost always identify at least one contender who’s my least favourite choice, but to prevent that person from getting elected requires making sure that all the votes I have are cast.
One of the other things I noted over the past week was the photo scandal of Princess Kate, with Kate’s social media claiming that she did the photoshop herself. Whether you believe that the palace would allow any of the Royal Family direct access to their own social media feeds is another story, but what struck me is how quickly the forces of the internet jumped on the photo to point out various indicators of it being edited. Why? Of all the things people could be doing, why are we trying to pry into whatever is happening with this family. The editing of the picture points out just how much pressure these people must feel to present a good image at the same time that it points out how they probably aren’t doing that well. How much of a bubble have people like you and me forced on people like the Royal Family or other celebrities whose lives are disrupted by paparazzi because we’ll pay to see it.
But this is celebrity, right? This is what people who put themselves forward in the public choose to undertake when they get the positions, right? But I don’t think it is. And it’s absolutely not the fault of the children who are born into that family, so in respect of those, the next time you see a paper or website or news program offering gossip about someone. Consider taking your attention elsewhere. Remember that two children in that family already grew up as orphans because of our need for news about them. We don’t need to create any more. So go, make your vote, and enjoy the read!
