It’s finally here – the first Student Government election day.
And while so many of you are going to try to avoid the hoards of blue or green shirts on Turlington Plaza today, we’d like to make one final plea to you to go out and place your votes.
Besides the fact that it only takes two minutes and there are more than 10 different polling places, voting in SG elections is actually more important than you think.
Other than the $14.4 million budget that SG officials oversee, which is comprised of your Student Activity & Service Fees that are taken out of the tuition you pay, the Student Body president is the only student voice on the board of trustees and the Senate decides what student organizations get funding.
He or she sits in a stuffy room all day with stuffy old men and goes to bat for what the students want.
These may seem like small, meaningless things, but just ask Gators for a Sustainable Campus, who almost lost its funding last year, how important SG is.
And turnout in past elections is nothing to brag about.
Voting numbers from past elections show the Student Body’s overwhelming apathy when it comes to SG as a whole.
Last fall, only 8,483 out of UF’s 49,679 students voted.
That’s 17 percent of the Student Body.
Even at one of its high points, during fall 2008 of the presidential election, only 10,469 students bothered to vote.
Can we just point out how pathetic that is?
This group of students that makes up SG has its grubby fists on more money than all the Alligator staff combined will make in a lifetime, and the vast majority of you don’t even care enough to lean over a folding table and fill in a few bubbles?
You already know our stance on Student Body president, vice president and treasurer.
You also know that we support the Reitz Union fee — granted that they follow through on the fact that graduate assistants will not pay.
There are also two other referendums. The first one, a constitutional amendment, is pretty confusing, and we don’t really care.
The other one, however, may be small and shoved to the bottom of the page, but it’s an important issue for our university.
The questions ask if UF should join the Worker Rights Consortium, a national organization that monitors labor conditions, to ensure that licensed merchandise with UF and Gators logos is not made in sweatshops. Our answer is yes.
Voting yes won’t immediately effect campus-wide change, but a position of solidarity among students will impart a powerful message to university administration and make it clear that Gators don’t support the use of sweat shops (except those of you in your orange and blue Nikes).
The most important thing to realize, though, is that we actually don’t care that much how you vote — we just care that you vote.
