What started off as a throwaway comment almost lead to me getting elected to a school office yesterday. And with almost little effort on my part. Yesterday's key election issue was the decision a to whether or not students would allow the school to increase Student Fees to allow for the construction of a series of improved athletic facilities. When I logged in to vote, I noticed that one posistion (Communications Board) was being put up for vote with out any official candidate. The only choices were to Abstain, or Write-In a candidate.

My roomate jokingly voted for me. Not knowing who was actually running, I also voted for myself. Then I started thinking, how fun would it be to get my name listed on the voter results. I didn't want the office, and since I was graduating in May I wouldn't be elligible to hold the office anyway. Worst case scenario (or was it best?) was that I'd get elected and would just have to back out. I got to work, and by the end of the day I estimated that I had recieved 5-6 votes. Hardly enough to get elected right?

Boy was I wrong! You'll note that the winning "candidate" for Communications Board recieved a whopping EIGHT votes. That means if my estimates are accurate, I was only two votes away from a tie, and potential victory. How frightening is that? On a campus of 14000 students, I could've held a Student Government Office simply because me and a handful of friends thought it'd be funny to write me in.

Other scary results: The Crawford Complex representatives each recieved a total of 2 votes. That is, they each voted for themselves and were thusly elected. Not only that, but only around 3000 people voted on the Student Fee referendum. That's not even a third of the campus deciding on something that will effect everybody!

After seeing the results, I emailed the MSSA to ask why my name didn't appear on the results. Apparently they were only showing the winner for some categories in order to keep the document from being too large. I'm going to visit the offices tomorrow and view the official results to see just how close I came to being the Communications Something-Or-Other. I'll report back just how close it actually was.

The lesson you should take away from all this? Get involved in politics...or somebody who may be totally unqualified for the posistion may end up getting it!