I couldn't sleep all weekend. I tossed and turned, counted sheep and drank a glass of warm milk to no avail. The thought that 2,600 students today could determine the fate of students' finances for the next 30 years was just too much to handle, and there was no way I was getting any Z's.

As it turns out, my sleepless nights were wholly justified by the outrageous outcome of the Associated Students of Madison elections announced Monday night: The Living Wage and Student Union Initiative referendums both passed by a large margin of the small number of students who actually showed up to vote.

The Union initiative alone will raise student-segregated fees by almost $200 — amounting to each University of Wisconsin student for the next three decades contributing, personally, almost $800 over the course of his college career to rebuild Union South and restore Memorial Union.

The referendums amount to literally hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of students, yet the whole thing happened with much less student interaction than it deserved. The referendums should have been decided by something more significant than a simple ASM ballot that students usually disregard as superfluous.

A medium usually reserved for deciding John Smith or Jane Doe for treasurer decided something much more important to everyday student life than anything our student government has accomplished in recent history. Instead of deciding John vs. Jane, the ballot's outcome will very seriously punish students both present and future — potentially until the class of 2037 walks across the stage.

But what makes this semester's election even more absurd is that it followed two attempts to decide the same referendums in the spring — and one the year before to boot. Only this time, there was no way a reasonable number of students could have participated, and as expected, the elections only drew 6.6 percent of the student body to the polls.

The first two spring elections were hosted online by DoIT and were open over the course of several days to anyone within walking distance of a computer. In last semester’s online go-around, almost four times as many voters as this round — an astonishing 22.4 percent of students — decided to pass the Living Wage referendum and kill off the Union plan once and for all.

But even though the number of misappropriated votes was less than the number of votes it would have taken to change the outcome, the results were voided by the Student Judiciary — another branch of ASM — and sent to the polls again for good measure.

So, thanks to the sheer incompetence of the Associated Students of Madison combined with a less-than-skilled set of DoIT programmers, the elections were relegated to the physical realm and doomed to receive low turnout and skewed results. Why ASM couldn't spend a few thousand dollars to have a professional firm devise what amounts to a simple online survey is beyond me — but what the heck, it's only $200,000,000 of icing on 30 years' worth of tuition, right?

Paper ballots aren't the end of the trail of tears, however. After all, before the Internet, plenty of student voting took place on paper ballots and it was all just hunky-dory. The problem was exacerbated this time by a lack of sufficient polling locations and a poor schedule.

Just getting to one of the four polling locations on campus — College Library, Wendt Library, Gordon Commons or Holt Commons — was not an easy task for someone working on a stopwatch between classes and midterms. What's more, the polls were only open for six-and-a-half hours on Wednesday and Thursday: between 12 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

For those students suffering through exams last week, a student government election was less than a priority, even for those lucky enough to know about the referendums in the first place. Lumbering halfway across campus to Helen C. in freezing winds, 15 minutes before an exam in 165 Bascom, is barely worth the extra student-segregated fees — especially if it's going to cut into study time.

So, the Student Union Initiative got their millions at the expense of students now and practically forever. And the Living Wage referendum, a completely unnecessary measure to ensure students earn enough to support four family members, looks to be a success.

All thanks to 6.6 percent of the student body, 1,691 of whom voted in favor of the Union initiative and 1,418 of whom voted in favor of the Living Wage referendum. Decades of students at UW are doomed to pay a debt decided by less than 4 percent of the student body today.

Good luck sleeping tonight.

Taylor Hughes ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in information systems.