Alex Harries's diary

That's the end of elections for another year, and the last year I'll be involved in the Union. It's been a helluva fortnight, with a larger UPSU Media presence than ever before.

For the first year ever, we've had photographers and videographers (is that the right term?) running around at pretty much every elections-related event, a massive amount of visual media, a great deal of coverage in Pugwash News, not to mention Pure FM's involvement in interviewing the candidates live on air and broadcasting the hustings candidates' question time events in the evenings last week.

I'm amazingly proud and grateful to all of our student volunteers for all their work in the last few weeks - we have, for the first time, a lot of video footage (and there's more to come, which will be used as teaser-material for next year I hope), and there's been an almost constant stream of photos and updates going online from elections-related events.

(You can check out the elections photos, videos, and Pure FM podcasts, and our elections minisite - the largest ever at 75 pages - here).

This year, we've seen roughly a 15% rise in voter turnout despite the poor weather and the end of term (who doesn't know at least one friend who went home half way through this week suffering from parental withdrawal symptoms? ;o) and, although candidate numbers were the same as last year (fourteen candidates), the distribution among positions has been almost diametrically opposed, with last year's least-contested positions seeing the largest numbers of candidates this year.

A couple of people have observed that this year's line-up has been a very marked "pitched battle" between sports clubs and societies and, while I can't comment on how accurate that statement is - it is, after all, a pretty narrow-focused assessment of a candidate to say that they're a "sporto" or "society person" (or "soco"?) - the figures do seem to show that the candidates who received the most votes in each position are all well-known fac...