Slating for seats in Student Government ended at 5 p.m. Tuesday. Participation was high this semester: 617 students slated for Swamp Party, while 175 slated for the most recent incarnation of its opposition, Access Party. All in all, it was a civil affair — enthusiasm for the political process met the machinery of SG bureaucracy, signing up students to run for seats and affect the future of this university.
Slating’s end, though, means this period of calm and civility is over. The game is on: If you’re running, it’s time to do whatever you can to sharpen yourself up because things are set to get nasty. Not Toronto-after-the-Stanley-cup nasty, but every bit as backhandedly passive-aggressive as SG elections can get.
Starting tomorrow — or in all likelihood, today — aggressive campaigning will commence. Certainly engulfing every corner of campus, it’ll probably rage online, too — SG campaigning knows no boundaries. Closer to election day, there’ll be unnaturally eager people stationed every 50 feet. Everywhere you walk, each of their grinning faces curling up to ask, “Are you voting?” You’ll feel as if you’re trapped in nightmare from a bad coming-of-age comedy.
And that’s just speaking from experiences from the past year and a half, a time in SG history when elections were a rubber stamp on single-party rule. Swamp could’ve won 48 of 50 Senate seats last Fall with no campaigning whatsoever. Now faced with the revival of significant opposition, Swamp Party will have to put forth increased effort. Access Party, we presume, will do its best to fight back.
If you’re an innocent civilian, we wish you the best in any efforts to stay out of it. Perhaps try hiding behind a copy of the Alligator while you read our outstanding election coverage.
Seriously, aside from major breaking news stories, SG elections are the biggest thing that happens around here. For many at UF, these biannual political showdowns are more exciting than the Super Bowl. It’s when we at the Alligator stay up extra late and work extra hard to deliver you the finest SG journalism out there.
Since we can already hear some of you scoffing, let us take a moment to acknowledge something. We’ve been known to take a less-than-friendly stance toward SG. But that’s always taken place here, in Opinions, where we — just like every other newspaper on the planet — let out our feelings so we can focus on staying objective in our coverage. Which is the way it should be. Our feelings will always appear on pages six and seven. We strive for everything else to be fact-based and unbiased.
If, for any reason, you have issues with our coverage, want to give us story ideas or just need to vent, let us know. We can’t fix problems we aren’t aware of, and we can’t publish stories we know nothing about. Our SG beat reporter is Ariana Figueroa, and our editor-in-chief is Kathryn Varn. They can be contacted at afigueroa@alligator.org and editor@alligator.org, respectively.
We hold ourselves to a high standard, and we hope you’ll do the same.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 2/4/2015 under the headline “Alligator available for feedback during election season"]
