Musings on Senate Elections

Today was day one of the annual spring elections that continue tomorrow. We're also doing the referendum on smoking in the residence halls, for which we need to register a 10 percent turnout of the student body...actually of those students who are taking classes on campus. That means we need to get about 400 people to vote.

Sounds easy, right?? NOT. Getting people to vote is like pulling teeth sometimes. Many students are willing to come vote if you ask, some are even eager to do so. However, too often our efforts are met with "I don't care" or "Yeah, I did it"...when it's clear they haven't and they are just brushing us off. Body language and tone of voice say a lot. In the worst cases, students just walk by, staring straight ahead, and don't even bother to acknowledge we exist. All we can do is laugh it off, but it's really rather rude. Granted, they may not wish to vote, and the elections are usually far from competitive, but the least a person could do is offer a simple "No" when asked if they want to vote. We are not invisible!

Who knows if we'll get the numbers we need. I guess we just have to be thankful for those that we ARE able to convince to vote. Hey, Nicole even met Erin, who she's only known in blog form up to this point, and I saw an acquaintence I thought transferred after last year, which was kind of funny.

We shall see what tomorrow brings.