Sebastien Angel | Take UA elections seriously

College can be a bit different from sixth grade. Take student government, for example.

Penn's Class Boards and Undergraduate Assembly actually matter, unlike their pre-pubescent counterparts. The UA, for one, allocates about $1.55 million in student funds. And it's been the driving force behind such projects as the Ruckus music service and the shuttle buses to the airport.

Yet Penn's student government elections remain the stuff of sixth graders: silly and based on all the wrong things.

Accurate turnout figures for the president, vice president and VP of corporate sponsorship races aren't available because several candidates withdrew or were disqualified. But according to Dan Strigenz, vice chairman of elections for the Nominations and Elections Committee, "overall voter turnout" was 62 percent last election.

It's telling that even though all you have to do to vote is log onto Penn inTouch, two-fifths of the student body wasn't willing to cast a ballot.

Why aren't more students taking this seriously? Because many candidates aren't taking it seriously, either.

Each semester, The Daily Pennsylvanian publishes an advertisement from the NEC in which candidates introduce their platforms to their potential constituents. That ad for freshmen candidates comes out tomorrow. The worst of these blurbs generally consist of three types of statements:

n The vaguest possible claims: "I will fight for the Class of 2009," "I will always be open to suggestions," "I will let your voice be heard" and so on. It's the stuff of Miss America pageant contestants - why not just say that you support world peace?

n Bad jokes: One candidate simply submitted lyrics from Enrique Iglesias' "Hero" - another punctuated her statement with a couple of puns about Pokemon. (Two cultural phenomena I could do without hearing from again.)

n Absurd promises: Last year, these ran the gamut from room-service meal plans to home-cooked Indian dinners. After a while, I was expecting to be offered 40 acres, a mule and three virgins for my vote.

Anyone who knows me will attest that I'm not averse to a good joke or a home-cooked meal. But if the prospective members of student government aren't going to treat their endeavor legitimately, the voters are just going to vote for whoever has the best Pokemon line.

In the fall of 2005, the DP quizzed 13 freshmen UA candidates on issues that any prospective UA member should know about. Not surprisingly, few students seemed to care when the results were published. A few days after the article was printed, my class elected three representatives who couldn't name the leader of the organization they were trying to join. Two of the three couldn't even name three issues on the UA's agenda.

All three ran for re-election in spring 2006. Two of them won comfortably, while the other missed the cutoff by only 14 votes.

That's not so bad if all you have to do is run a bake sale to fund Mrs. Smith's class field trip to the Liberty Bell. But when you're distributing more than $1 million and representing 10,000 students, it's not acceptable.

UA chairman Brett Thalmann disagrees with my assessment, though. Thalmann pointed out - correctly - that most UA members did very well on the quiz. But it's not the candidates' overall performance that I find troubling. Rather, it's that those who did poorly were just as likely to get elected as their well-versed opponents.

And I don't mean to suggest that the UA is composed entirely of frauds that frivolously distribute money while listening to "Bailamos". I have no doubt, as Thalmann asserts, that the majority are serious and represent our interests well. I'm encouraged by increased student interest in the UA - Thalmann notes that 45 percent more students are running this year. Still, last year's elections show that there's ample room for improvement. (Just as a refresher, UA members: Your chairwoman last year was Rachel Fersh.)

I won't be voting in the elections that start tomorrow (they're for freshmen only). But I'd like to call on freshmen not to make the same mistakes that my class did. Take the UA seriously, and vote for candidates who are taking it seriously - after all, it's your money they're handling. All of it comes from of the "general fee" that Penn docks us every semester. So we may as well get the most we can from them.

And until our votes tell them otherwise, we're just going to keep getting more Pokemon jokes.

Sebastien Angel is a College sophomore from Worcester, Mass. Overnight Celebrity appears on Wednesdays.

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