When you vote someone into a position like school Co-Pres or cluster council, are you voting for them or their policies? Do you know their competition? And most importantly, will it even matter who you pick? The point of this piece is to have you question the respective weights of the various factors in student elections, their consequences, and whether you are happy with them. And if you aren’t, then to have you consider changing the process by which we choose our leadership.
There are countless different criteria voters follow when voting. The main two being the candidate’s policies or personal connection to a candidate. For all student elections, there is a limit on policies, and they must be cleared with the administration. Afterwards, they generally don’t get cleared for many changes besides the policies they ran on. They do, however, get to give speeches at various significant events and serve as a representation of the school. So if you want to vote for them for those reasons, that’s understandable.
Alternatively, you could vote for their policies; by the time they present them, they are supposedly already approved by the administration and limited in number so voters can easily understand them. Yet at the same time, they often seem to fall through—so often that people expect them to. Additionally, it seems many people don’t bother to research the candidates’ policies beyond the speeches they are required to listen to. So then, what is the point of their policies? To give insight into who the candidates are, I suppose. But the fact that people present policies that the student body expects to fail seems strange and borderline dishonest. It muddies the waters of what people are meant to vote on. I would accept it if the election was acknowledged as a popularity competition, but instead the candidates jump through many hoops to create a campaign just for it to get discounted on presentation, perhaps to superficially legitimize the election process.
My first complaint is that many of the elected positions appear to me as both powerless in enacting their policies and elected on a somewhat disingenuous premise. I would then argue that the elected positions should be granted greater authority; or, the administration should be more critical of their policies prior to their presentation, because what is the point of presenting policies that won’t end up happening?
My second complaint is that Andover students aren’t good voters. I say not because they are unintelligent, but because not only do they not research the candidates, they don’t even pay the bare minimum attention for an informed decision. If you asked students coming out of the copresidential debate All-School Meeting what the eight policies presented were, I bet that less than 20% could name them all, myself among the majority.
I previously wrote a commentary piece complimenting democracy at PA, due to its simplified design for consumption. However I have come to the conclusion that it is still not enough. It will likely never be enough; people who don’t care can’t be forced to care.
Many people, myself included, just vote based on the person they know better or like more, disregarding nearly all information provided by the election process. Again, I would accept it if the election was acknowledged as a popularity contest, but we are currently sitting in an ambiguous halfway point with other factors that are supposedly doing something.
My solution would be a democratic republic where people give their votes to someone who is willing to research the election with genuine depth. Every 10 people would give their vote to 1 person, who goes and talks to each candidate and learns about them and their policies. The researcher would get some kind of verification that they attended at least 1 talk by each candidate to validate their vote. Then you can talk amongst yourselves as groups and hopefully reach an agreement.
These might not be perfect or perhaps even accurate analyses or improvements, but I want to draw attention to the topic. These student-elected positions both hold authority over us, but are also one of our main ways to create the change and policies we want. If we don’t want to prioritize this policy-making opportunity in favor of popularity or representation that is perfectly acceptable, but at that point we should create new pathways for change. Any plans for the future rest on one question: what do we want to be driving our elections?
