The last time Student Council tried to pick a topic for the 2009-10 University Unity Project, students made a mockery of the process. Online polls closed with 25,000 votes cast, even though there are only about 20,000 students at the University.
It seems that Council has learned from this folly. For the re-vote on the project, which began yesterday, a more secure process makes sure that each student can cast only one vote, guaranteeing some semblance of legitimacy.
Improved security is not the only improvement in the Unity Project selection process for which Council merits praise. The new voting system also allows students to rank the possible projects, instead of casting only one vote. Hopefully this proactive stance to improving the voting system will be a lasting trend, for there is still work to do. Though votes are now secure, and the opinions of those who do vote are more accurately reflected, the vote will only be a legitimate reflection of student opinion with high voter turnout.
So far, Council’s publicity effort has been lacking in two key areas. First, its attempt at reaching the student body is too small in scale. Second, the time period for voting, three days, is too brief given the delayed publicity.
Council has relied thus far on the following methods: a press release, a mass e-mail to listservs across the University and a Facebook group invitation to University students. While these are respectable attempts at diversifying the approach to publicity, they suffer from a reliance on viral publicity. The listserv blitz will only work if others get the message and pass it on. This is effectively out of Council’s hands, which limits this method’s usefulness, especially when speed is necessitated by the lack of advance notice and the short, three-day voting period.
Even worse, most of the listservs the e-mail was first sent to were either related to Council or composed of those on Council. As for the Facebook group, there were only 1,000 invites, which is about 5 percent of the student population. The Unity Project vote will not be legitimate without high turnout, but its legitimacy will be even less if the turnout is concentrated in those areas of the University that are already well-represented on Council.
Though the press release had the potential to spark coverage which would reach a broader base of constituents, it was rendered less effective by the fact that it was sent less than 24 hours before the polls opened. Students, who likely had not already heard about the vote, would at the earliest be informed on the day voting began. Because the release was sent so late, after the news stories for Wednesday’s Cavalier Daily had already been chosen, students won’t be reading about it until today. Council was wise to ensure the voting ended before the transition to its newly-elected successors, and three days would have been sufficient, but the lag in publicity effectively truncated the voting period to an unreasonably short length.
Even utilizing the same methods, Council should have started its media blitz to the public a few days earlier. This blitz, however, should have been aimed at a larger segment of students instead of merely those few who already have close contact with Council. Although the new process by which the Unity Project is being chosen is a clear improvement, it will not be fully legitimate unless there is large and diverse voter turnout.
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