Bristol SU have only just released the vote breakdown for their March election

The SU have only just released the vote breakdown for their election which happened seven months ago in March.

The vote breakdown per candidate for the election, which had a huge turnout of nearly 43,000 student votes, was uploaded to the SU website on the 12th November.

The timestamp for the website says 13th March, but the SU revealed yesterday in a Bristruth comment section that “a little thing called covid got in the way” and that the results of the vote breakdown were now newly available online.

The SU have since been called out in a statement by Bristruths for their failure to communicate the vote breakdown, and for the “sarcastic” nature of the comment.

The anonymous Bristruths admins themselves had been awaiting the vote breakdown, as their own candidate “Bristruths Rory” ran in the election. They claim that their candidate was not sent his vote breakdown, despite other candidates in the election being informed of their vote counts on the day of the election.

In the statement, Bristruths said: “Thanks to current events we all know the importance of transparent, and truly democratic elections – hence this statement. We are very disappointed in the SU. We find it unacceptable that it took over 7 months to release this data when the student demographic and opinion has changed dramatically given recent events.”

Bristruths stress that they are not accusing the SU of “fraud or malpractice”, but are questioning whether the results would have been posted at all without the prompts from anonymous submissions on their page, or would they have been “buried indefinitely”.

They also said: “We also find the manner in which the SU revealed this information to be questionable to say the least, they chose to reveal the results of the MARCH election in a comment on a Bristruth that was posted in November. Not an email. Not a statement. Just a sarcastic comment, “A little thing called covid got in the way”, and a link to the results.”

They have called on the SU to release a statement addressing their concerns, including: When the SU were planning to release the results, why they advertised them to the student body in a comment section of a post and why Bristruths Rory was not offered a voter breakdown when other candidates were.

The Bristol Tab has contacted the Bristol SU for comment.

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