ASFA elections: final thoughts

Voting in the elections for the executive of the Arts and Sciences Federation of Associations began today. For the past two weeks these elections have been the subject of our editorials.

In these elections, and with certain candidates, we saw some disturbing trends that we felt were important to address.

When the topic of this week’s editorial came up, one of the first thoughts was an endorsement. It’s been something of a common practice of ours to endorse a specific party or candidates at election time in civic, provincial, federal and student elections. However this time around it quickly became clear that none of the three parties contesting this election was deserving of our endorsement.

While we agreed that the Stronger ASFA team would be a bad choice for Concordia students, we could not in good conscience publicly support one of the other two groups.

This isn’t to say that all the candidates running with these groups are bad – some of them are actually particularly good – but as we addressed in this week’s editorial, both of these teams, as a whole, have left us with a bad taste.

The fact that both teams have attempted to have opponents disqualified for alleged cheating, rather than attempting to win on the “issues” is most depressing.

This amounts to little more than dirty tricks and is fundamentally undemocratic. Were there actually significant violations of the electoral rules complaints would be understandable, but in these cases the allegations amount to little more than conjecture and finger pointing.

I am especially saddened by the direction taken by the New Energy team. Last year, when New Energy presidential candidate Joel Suss was running for CSU president with the Fresh slate, we endorsed his team. Not because we thought he would win, but because we liked the fact that they were outsiders, that they had no ties to the petty scandals and corruption of the past. (And, in part, because I always root for the under dog).

But this time, we have seen New Energy working with individuals who have a history of back-room dirty tricks in previous student elections.

Fresh faced outsiders no longer.

Late last week, members of the team came to the Concordian with allegations that one of the individuals who had helped organize their campaign had turned against them and was working on behalf of the CSU to get them out of the race, in order to avoid their splitting the vote with Innovation and allowing a Stronger win.

Strangely, some members of the team were not even aware of these allegations until after speaking with the Concordian several days later.

Moreover, the group’s campaign manager, Beisan Zubi, told me that while she stood by the claims that a former organizer had encouraged them to leave the race, she didn’t see a conspiracy coming down from the CSU executive.

When I spoke to the former organizer in question, Vanessa O'Connor, she denied encouraging them to drop out of the race, but said she’d distanced herself from the team because of who they were working with and the change in the tone of their campaign. She did admit that she was concerned about the possibility of vote splitting.

To us this wasn’t news, so we decided not to cover this “story” in the paper. The fact that someone grew disillusioned with your party is hardly cause for conspiracy theories and complaints to election officials (and the media).

Now I don’t want to cast this entire team in a bad light, several of us have been consistently impressed with Nicole Devlin who is running for vice president internal with New Energy, if any of the candidates in this entire campaign disserve to win – and will do a good job for Concordia students – it’s her.

As is typical in student elections, in the run up to the vote we were deluged with letters of support for various candidates. A couple weeks before the election, we set a policy that we would only run letters that relate to something that appeared in the paper or the paper in general. So we decided not to run the majority of them (several letters this week were thinly veiled letters of support, with a reference to an article, we let those run).

But the thing that struck me most about the letters is that almost none of them actually talked about policy, platforms or issues. Instead the letter writers talked about how the candidates were their friends (and were hard workers) and that’s why you should vote for them.