Why I hate election campaigning

If you were harassed outside the library over the last few years by some ginger person asking you in a monotone Mockney accent to vote for someone or something, it was probably me. But a year of never leaving the library has left me with no friends, and suddenly I’m without a campaign to support. Now my interaction with the student elections has come down to walking past people outside the library, ignoring them, and having my Facebook spammed to no end.

When you’re involved so intimately in a campaign, your perspective on the elections becomes completely at odds with what 95% of the student body thinks. You live in your own little bubble (bubbleception?), where you think the election can be won over by whomever has the best line in their manifesto on how many photocopiers there should be in the union.

Ultimately, elections come down to two things: who has the funniest name and who has the most friends. Case in point: The night before voting in my first year, my academic parents took me out on the lash. I approached voting slightly drunk and in complete ignorance. One of the AU candidates had the name Dick. Victory was inevitable. The media outlets in St Andrews do a great job of covering the Sabbatical positions, but for the SRC and SSC and SBS and S Club 7, no one really gives a hoot.

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During election week, Facebook looks like an online version of Where’s Wally?, with half your friends making their favourite candidate’s picture their new cover photo or profile pic. I had no idea who the hell anyone was anymore. Presumably people think that having a photo of someone will make me want to vote for them. On the contrary, it just makes me not want to talk to you.

In retrospect, that might have been the intention.

Of course people will point out that I’m being cynical, and that our annual turnout of 548% is a credit to the University, as is the passion of the candidates in developing policies they have no chance of fulfilling. If people could do it in a way that wasn’t so needlessly grating, though, I’d be much obliged.

Much of the debate in the last few days has revolved around the candidate’s potential relationship with the University. While this is very important, it’s also the most boring thing in the world. The reason campaigns need to be innovative and witty is precisely because the issues each nominee wants to be the one to ‘resolve’ are so dull. The self-indulgent nature of student elections essentially means that debates are solely waged between and listened to by the candidates themselves (and a few hardcore groupies). The majority of the students are too busy drinking/shagging/working/eating biscuits to care.