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 faces around the Union.

Last month, I made a conscious decision not to choose who I wanted to support during the elections process. To have done so would have been to make my life as a trustee of the UPSU charity and editor-in-chief of a lot of the Union's media much harder, and I have no doubt that at some point or other I would have found myself second-guessing any editorial decisions I made to reassure myself that I hadn't unintentionally biased myself for or against a particular candidate. It's a decision I definitely don't regret, although explaining to candidates that I wasn't planning to vote was a difficult process (although, in my defence, I also didn't realise I could vote until yesterday!).

The hardest part of the elections process, for anyone involved with the Union, is the thought that a candidate who you count as a friend might not be elected. Unfortunately, that's a position I found myself in this year, and it's never nice to see a friend's election bid failing to be successful but, that said, there's a small amount of comfort to be gained in knowing that everyone who was elected this year have, so far, shown a great deal of promise and ability, and a willingness to go out of their way for the positions they all campaigned for which will hopefully translate into rampant enthusiasm for their new jobs when they come into office.

So, here's to the new Sabb team. The old Sabb team have a short four-and-a-half months left in office, and the last few weeks are going to be spent working closely with the new team members, so in no time at all, last night's successful candidates will be sitting at their desks in the Sabb office learning the ropes of the new jobs.

Good luck! :o)

/al

Comments have been closed for this article

 

 

and they were?????

Sat, 15 Mar 2008

 

 

Dear anonymous commenter, if the "they" to which you refer are the winners of the elections, you can find out by visiting the elections mini-site at www.upsu.net/elections 
 
Otherwise, I have no idea at all what the fap you're going on about :o)

Alex Harries - Sun, 16 Mar 2008