It has been said that people have a certain civic duty to vote, and such is a theory to which I happily subscribe. One who complains about the state of affairs in any democratic organization and yet resists the ballot is surely a hypocrite of the highest degree.
Yet voting in this spring's Associated Students of Madison election has a strangely sadomasochistic feel. Leafing through the online ballot, it is easy to cast a duo of negative votes toward the costly and unnecessary referendums that threaten this campus. But in order to vote against these measures, one must too consider the various candidates seeking elected office within the student government.
Rarely has the phrase "lesser evilism" found a more apt application, as a vote in favor of seemingly any of these pathetic résumé-padders is a vote in support of a system that is so bitterly flawed unto itself as to be deserving of complete abandon.
Ironically, ASM is so wantonly disorganized that one can easily have trouble identifying the political composition of the various candidates for office. The student government works with an informal system of slates — roughly tantamount to political parties — where the various candidates may join a platform and loose organizational structure.
The problem is that these structures are so loose as to be wholly prohibitive of comprehension. In researching this column and other articles for this newspaper, I have contacted several high-ranking members of ASM, been in touch with various campus leaders and fully utilized the powers of both Google and Facebook. What I have found is a system so poorly organized and cryptically arranged that many in the ASM leadership openly profess to not even knowing how many slates there are or who claims allegiance to which.
What one does find in researching this election, though, is a group of candidates seemingly incapable of thinking outside the nauseating realms of ASM's wasteful status quo.
Many candidates openly opine on how and where they believe segregated fees ought to be spent. Few are discussing the obvious point, which is that these student taxes continued to be levied at an unprecedented level, thinning out the already slender wallets of undergraduates and supporting a long list of campus "services" that completely fail to touch the average student in any remotely recognizable fashion.
There is, of course, one group of candidates who have an answer for segregated fees: the Robin Hood slate. This is the most conservative — and best organized — of the slates, and one plank of the group's platform does address the ballooning segregated fee system on this campus.
The problem is that the Robin Hood slate is an organization barely more credible than whatever campus pinko lunatic decided the best way to cry out for the cause of freedom would be to launch a brick through the local Army Recruiting Station. These are the people who swept this campus a year ago with high promises of fiscal responsibility and who were, accordingly, placed in power. They have now held the reins for a full year and all we have to show for it is even higher segregated fees and a continuation of stunningly wasteful campus spending programs.
Indeed, when it comes to the Robin Hood slate, there is an old motto that seems fitting: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
And so students find themselves in a genuine bind. It is a high civic duty to vote, and ballots must be cast as a means of defeating the two spending-heavy referendums. But for once the marketplace of ideas has failed this campus as few suitable candidates for office actually appear on the ballot.
Gone are the days of the Matt Modells who actually had a vision to seize power and work for meaningful change. Sadly, we now live in an era of little people reaching for big offices with little ideas.
And with such being the harsh reality of ASM, it is perhaps time that we consider abolishing those very offices.
Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is editor in chief of The Badger Herald and a senior majoring in rhetoric.
