The unfortunate reality of politics in our ubiquitous winner-takes-all elections is the need to congregate around the “lesser of two evils.” It’s not a secret concept: Ralph Nader will rarely earn enough votes to beat George Bush, so vote for Al Gore instead.
“Yes, he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard.”
This kind of thing is done every year in ASUO elections that feature more than two candidates, with the slate that loses in Executive sweeping their senators along into the conglomeration. And this week, presidential and vice presidential candidates Ben Bowman and Lamar Wise have decided to bring on board the slate of independent candidates who were left from the Kate and Alex slate.
Ultimately, this is the wise choice for them. Through the ASUO constitution, the Senate has a lot of power for setting the money students pay for programs and services with the president simply holding a veto power. And so it makes some sense for him to choose to support Senate candidates who agree with him on a majority of issues than not. This is an effort to get more power in the Senate; it’s what could have usually been expected of him.
However, in this case, the people he’s now supporting have benefited directly from an action that lost him votes in the primary elections. It just seems unfair, given the circumstances of everything that’s happened in this election cycle.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Emerald was notified that Student Planning and Construction Committee candidate Manny Garcia@@http://tinyurl.com/7gcjbaf@@ had withdrawn from the ballot, and Garcia is what concerned us most about this merger. The idea that Bowman was forced@@forced? really?@@ into supporting the person who compromised the privacy of his running mate’s email was shocking, and up until Garcia removed his name from the fray, that’s what the Ben and Lamar slate was doing.
Beyond the unfortunate implications of those Executive candidates supporting the independent Senate candidates, we really have to feel for the Ben and Lamar Senate candidates who didn’t make it through the primaries. The loss of votes they suffered will not be recovered, and so they have fallen into the metaphorical cracks of this system.
This is the dirty necessity of ASUO elections. While those explicitly implicated in the phishing scandal have been brought justice, those who implicitly received an unfair leg up have been rewarded with further support.