The Election Campaign

It was a fluke, actually...



About a month ago I attended a meeting, organized by Jeff Long of the RRCSA, which was essentially a brainstorming/motivational session on how we can improve nominee and voter turnout for this year's election.



I didn't actually know about the meeting, because the email was sent to class reps last semester and I wasn't on the email list at the time. Ashton (from my class) told me about it, and she and I (and Jason Booth from 2nd year) attended the meeting. I figured what the heck; there was free pizza too.



Jeff and Carla from the SA were trying to leverage (word of the week) the resources of the students from various Creative Arts departments, in order to help improve the nominee and voter turn-out for this year's election. Part of that initiative meant producing a video, a radio spot (and getting it played), some posters, some literature etc, to increase awareness about the jobs and the election.



When I heard that two elected and paid positions went uncontested in last year's election, it sort of bothered me. I mean, the jobs pay over $16/hour, you have a flexible schedule where you're required to work 20 hours a week (for the VP posts) and 30 hours a week (for the pres. post), and the jobs are located right at the college. It occurred to me that more people ought to run.



Here's where things get dicey... The vast majority of the students at the Princess campus are enrolled in full time programs that require roughly 27 hours of class time, per week. The guidelines for the VP and Pres jobs require that the hours are served from Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 4:30pm, which provides a window of exactly 40 hours. So technically, it's impossible for a full time student to work those jobs; seven hours impossible to be exact.



I propose that the work window be extended. If it was from 8am to 6pm, that would provide an additional 10 hours per week for the time to be served. That solves the problem of the vice president positions, but not the 30 hour requirement for the President's job.



I think CreComm students could really benefit from working a job with the SA, but I doubt very many would do an extra year of the program just to be able take the job.



Poor nominee turn-out might not be a result of students not knowing about it (so not a messaging issue), but that so few people can actually fulfill the requirements under the current guidelines.



I decided to help with the campaign anyway, because it's a noble cause, and I thought it would be good experience for me to help with the media production side of it. So, I produced a radio spot, which I will post to my blog right after I post this message, and I plan to post the video next week.

Adam, the news director from KICK, and I have been talking about doing a live on-air debate, but that would obviously require more than one person to run...