Most people agree that the members of a committee that controls a budget of approximately 1.6 million dollars should be chosen carefully. It’s also the same council that decides which on-campus student groups to support and promote. Considering this, it’s almost shocking to see that only about 140 engineering students out of almost 6,000 voted in the recent elections for the Engineering Representatives on the FedS Student Council. Many students were either uninformed or just not interested in voting and other students attempted to vote but encountered problems.
Congratulations to Alex Hogeveen Rutter and Yasser Al-Khder who won the election. They will join Jordan Lui, Praveen Arichandran, Trevor Jenkins and Yousif Al-Khder, the current FedS Councillors. Alex’s main goal is to increase communication and understanding between FedS and EngSoc. Yasser’s platform focused more on ensuring that engineering students’ concerns were represented and on showing the rest of the student body what engineers can do. Suggestions are always welcome and contact information for all FedS Councillors can be found online at governance.feds.ca/student_council.
The responsibilities of a FedS Councilllor are summarised as follows:1
1/ Ensure that exec are acting in the best interest of students, and remaining accountable. Exec are required to submit monthly update reports of their activities. Councillors can also motion for the Exec to do certain things.
2/ Attend monthly meetings of council if they live within the predefined area. It is at these meetings that important decisions are taken for the way budget should be used and which student groups to support.
3/ Provide monthly update reports to council on their constituency and outline issues that students have identified. Councillors are also expected to read the other reports in order to question or confer with the other councillors as required.
4/ Participate in various committees that oversee different operations of the Federation. Core committees (that must always be filled) include, for example, a Budget Committee and Education Advisory Committee. A current ad-hoc (temporary) committee is developing the Long Range Plan for the Federation.
5/ Act as a communication tool between the Federation and Students, going both ways. Can use things such as announcements at society meetings, updates to the mailing lists, society newspaper articles or town hall meetings.
Although the stakes of this election were clearly rather important, there was little advertising of the election and the candidates. Only one of the three nominated candidates’ profiles was posted on the FedS voting website. The most publicised campaigning was restricted to a few Facebook groups involving less than 30 people and remained very quiet. The actual election itself did not seem to attract a lot of attention despite a call sent out to EngSoc over the mailing list. Overall, the effect was minimal in comparison to the attention gathered last year during the FedS elections, when Team Yellow covered the campus with posters. This may be the result the campaign period being in the middle of the Engineering Hell Week of midterms. There was also none of the debating that occurs for EngSoc elections in the CPH foyer and any posters in the engineering buildings were either very non-existent or simply far too discreet to attract any attention. Most of the students I talked to either had a vague idea that there was going to be an election for something, somewhere at some point or simply had no clue.
Many of those students who had a vague idea that voting was taking place simply chose not to vote. Plenty of engineering undergrads on the other hand decided to vote simply for the only candidates that they knew rather than trying to decide which candidate was most suited for the position. It is difficult from the perspective of a busy engineering student to understand how the results such an election can affect you and why it would be worth the time and effort to get informed. After all, FedS doesn’t seem directly involved in our classes and plenty of extracurricular activities on campus aren’t even affiliated with FedS. However, some would argue that you cannot benefit from such an election unless you choose to get involved. Sure, FedS controls a huge budget and can be used as a powerful tool of change, but plenty of students feel that all their needs and wishes with regards to FedS’ mandate will be met no matter who is elected. For many engineering students the stakes of a FedS election are simply not worth the aggravation required to get informed and actually place a vote.
Some students actually attempted to vote but found that they weren’t able to log in to the online voting system. One off-campus students on co-op, although eligible to vote, found that he was not officially part of the voters list. The making of the voters list is a drawn-out process and, according to the FedS IT department, almost always misses students. The Chief Electoral Officer is in charge of requesting student information from Student Accounts based on full-time enrolment and faculty. These lists are then used to populate the online voting ballots. Students who found that they could not vote were given the choice of either going to the SLC to fill out a paper ballot or sending their vote via email to Justin Williams, the Chief Electoral Officer. Although the CEO is bound to confidentiality, it was obviously preferred that students having trouble submitting their vote make their way to the SLC. Although this may sound like a minor challenge for anyone who actually cares about voting, to the reluctant voter it is simply one more hurdle that must be overcome and requires time and energy.
Congratulations again to the winners and hopefully they will be able to achieve the goals they outlined in their campaign platforms. However, this election has also clearly shown that unless engineering students are informed of the reasons why they should actually take a break from their busy lives to vote in FedS elections, voter turnout will be poor. There’s no way most engineering students will search through the internet to get an idea of what the candidates are planning to do and they will also not take more than five minutes to complete their voting ballots. FedS elections may be important but engineering students are also very busy and not very interested in stuff that doesn’t appear to have a direct impact on them.
1Trevor Jenkins, Current FedS Councillor
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