Every time I’ve gone through White Plaza, recently, I’ve been barraged by all sorts of young folk yelling and cheering about their student politics and their posters and their what-have-you. It all begs the question of how they give such a damn — or why no one else does.

Given the ease of voting in a Stanford election, let’s assume that the undergraduate turnout rate of 50% (last year, about 2/3 of freshmen and juniors, 1/3 of sophomores and seniors, though why this pattern exists escapes me) isn’t so low because voting is a hassle. I can come up with a couple possible explanations:

1. Stanford has no real problems. Sure, birth control is expensive, you want to room with your opposite-sex friends,  we waste energy, and the OSA is all up in your social manager’s grill. Maybe these are just trivial though. After all, the ASSU could completely fail to act, and most of us would barely notice the difference; that might be because these problems aren’t worth caring about. I’m not saying they are trivial — just that students might ultimately think of them this way.
2. Maybe the problems are real, but we just don’t think the ASSU will be able to solve them, or will even address the ones we care about. This is also a reasonable point of view, given the obvious and complete disregard the university has tended to show for significant student complaints. It’s as if you’re worried about the war in Iraq, but aren’t allowed to vote for anybody over the level of city council.
3. There’s no obvious way of telling which candidates will solve your problems, even if you have them and you think they’re fixable. Candidate platforms are vague, unrealistic, difficult to disseminate, and by and large identical. This is why real-life elections, even for small-time offices, involve political parties. Political parties are heuristics: you may not know who this candidate for local office is, but you do know that they’re a Democrat, and that’s good enough. Stanford, in the past, has had proto-parties: SOCC, and the Review, which have competed over a relatively small set of patronage-related issues. A classic sign of a mature democracy is when politics moves from patronage to public goods: that is, from spoils to ideas. We’re mired in party-less, patronage politics. It’s the difference between elections for City Council of New York in 1890, and  Prime Minister of Britain today. I don’t care what candidates for the ASSU propose — it’s all the same anyway — I want to hear how they think the ASSU operate. What kind of social contract exists in student government?

Anyway, I suspect each of these explanations is a little true, but it’s pretty hard to say confidently. Someone could write a great honors thesis on the ASSU.

I feel as if the first substantive post on here should be exciting, but instead, I want to talk about something boring and prosaic: the student group petition process.

Does anyone else think it’s a really ill-thought out system? The point of requiring signatures to get on the ballot, in general, is to weed out fakers and stunts. In real-life elections, it’s how we keep the ballot from getting overfull with bad-faith candidates. But have you looked at the list? These are all groups that are obviously deserving a vote. The system is a waste of their time, and of ours, because all of them are obviously serious.

This brings me to my next objection. On what basis are we supposed to choose among these groups? This question will be more pertinent in the spring when we’re actually casting special fees votes, but the answer isn’t at all clear. Should I sign and then vote for only those groups that I use, or that my friends are involved with? That seems small-minded. Should I sign and vote for any group that I think provides some service to somebody? Because that’s clearly all of them. I’m not necessarily down with the Cal rivalry or that into Big Game, but that doesn’t mean that some people don’t get some value from having the Axe Committee around. Ultimately, it seems like there isn’t any policy debate to have here. If you’re a legitimate group asking for a reasonable amount of money to provide a service that’s valuable to a certain group of people in proportion to the amount of money you’re asking for, you deserve it. How does the discussion continue past that point? What is there to argue about? Are you really going to make the case that Alternative Spring Break is deserving, but not Mock Trial?

These are not the kinds of questions that electorates are supposed to answer. They’re essentially factual questions — do these groups do what they purport to do? This is why we have experts — that is, legislatures. Leland, or Basmati Raas, or the Wind Ensemble, could go in front of the ASSU, give a 15 minute presentation, and get their money. This accomplishes the same goal (weeding out stunt/fake applicants, etc.) and saves everyone a lot of hassle. Well, everyone but the ASSU, but it’s their job anyway.