The Cavalier Daily Focus section recently wrote an excellent piece on apathy in student election voting. The findings of the article suggest that people fail to vote not only due to apathy, but also because they do not feel that the elections have a real impact on them. While it is not always obvious, student organizations with elected positions have an enormous impact on the lives of all students. Student organizations have failed to convey this to the student body and, until they fix this perception, there will continue to be a problem of voter apathy in University elections.
Low voter participation is a problem. As the Focus article lays out, the range of participation runs from around 50 percent by Batten students to 20 percent by Architecture students. The fact that only 50 percent of people in Batten voted, a school filled with people who deeply care about politics, shows how unmotivated people are to vote. This apathy is thriving because students see nothing to care about. Student organizations have failed to give people anything to care about, as multiple people mention in the article.
Student organizations have a strong impact on all University students. Student Council is the gatekeeper for thousands of dollars that go to CIOs as well as empowering the voice of student concerns to the Administration. There are over a dozen StudCo committees that affect everything from athletics to the arts. These committees do not have people with elected positions, but the elected Executive Board has control over all of them. The Honor Committee, and University Judiciary Committee to a lesser extent, also have a strong impact on all University students. Though most people are not brought before either organization, they both set a tone on Grounds that affects everyone.
All of these organizations need to do a better job advertising the work they do for the student body. StudCo advertises itself, and UJC strives to educate people about their work, but the fact is people remain apathetic. Honor is perhaps the best at advertisement, but the Honor system feels so static that it there is little motivation for students to engage the organization.There needs to be a more aggressive push by all of these organizations to make what they do apparent and important to University students.
Increasing voter participation starts with the candidates currently running for these positions. One of the things that suppresses voters, I suspect, is that the candidates do not do a good job communicating why voting for them matters. The messaging gets lost behind a slew of ideas that people have. I am all for having ideas and I appreciate how ambitious some candidates are, but voters are not excited by multiple paragraphs of policy (we can barely read headlines). I encourage candidates to have well-developed positions, but they should always be communicated in succinct and clear language.
There are plenty of things for these candidates to take strong and clear stances on. The recent Honor petition gives candidates an obvious issue that speaks to voters, and there’s always the idea of a multi-sanction system that people can address. StudCo candidates can emphasize projects or events that they would undertake, projects that would benefit all University students. Candidates for UJC have a more significant challenge, with the organization being less well known around the University, but they should at least take a strong stance on the four UJC referendums.
Low voter participation might be an indication of a deeper issue — that student organizations fail to help average students. As much as I think that student organizations provide a great service to students the fact that 80 percent of some schools do not care enough to vote for their representatives shows how disassociated many people feel from these organizations. Maybe it’s a problem of publicity or campaigning, or maybe it’s a basic failure of our student self-governance system. Either way, there needs to be a strong push to make student government show real results for students. Without this change there will never be significant student voter participation.
Bobby Doyle is an Opinion columnist for the Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
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