Will you "Vote Fail"?

My fellow blogger, Ken Joly, has began an interesting campaign via Facebook called "Votez Fail /Vote Fail". This campaign is directly geared towards Social Science students who will be asked, for a second time, to vote for who will represent them on the SFUO Board of Administration (BOA) during the 2010-2011 academic year. According to Joly, this campaign was spearheaded because of "the gross inconsistencies in the management of recent SFUO Elections and the seemingly autocratic and unprofessional behaviour of current-SFUO President Seamus Wolfe..."

He goes on to encourage all Social Science students who "are not happy with the way “democracy” exists at the SFUO..." to place a "Vote Fail" sticker on their ballot instead of spoiling it. I have thought this whole process over for a couple days now and am left with a few questions which I will put forward in this blog posting:

1. If students in fact place a "Vote Fail" sticker on their ballots, thus demonstrating their disapproval of the SFUO's failed "democratic" process, how will the student body then find out how many of the "spoiled" ballots actually contained one of these stickers?

2. As of March 16th at 8:20 pm, this Facebook group has 195 members; Assuming it continues to grow at the same pace until voting days, will this campaign gain enough steam to force realistic changes in the way the SFUO manages its elections?

I also feel the need to condemn the disqualification of three Social Sciences' candidates who ran in the original elections (Amanda Iarusso, Amanda Marochko and Matika Lauzon) due to the fact that they had "invalid" signatures (meaning one or more students having signed their nomination forms were not recognized as being apart of the Faculty of Social Sciences). I personally think that it's ridiculous that they weren't given an extra 24 hours to get the required number of valid signatures. Who could possibly argue against that? When you're trying to encourage a diversity of students to participate in student politics (more specifically the "Amandas" being women and Matika being a francophone), I think it's quite counter-productive to take such drastic measures as to disqualify these individuals. Let me be clear though in saying that regardless of the categories that these specific individuals fall under, ANY candidate being disqualified on such a pitiful technicality is frankly preposterous.