A brief update

I’m busy coordinating quite a few things at the moment, but I wanted to mention a few things.

Firstly, Alex van Mecl has withdrawn his candidacy for governor. This means that only the presidential, vice presidential, and Boca governor seats remain competitive. (I updated the election graphic below to reflect this on Friday and am just mentioning this belatedly.)

Second, details for the debates will hopefully be finalized by tomorrow afternoon. I should be able to post those on Wednesday.

Also, since someone was asking in the comments about when we will have hammocks on campus last week, I’ll share the update about this from the House meeting Friday. “Hammock Discovery Committee” chair Nona Smatrakaleva said she’s currently looking at sites:

• “between the General [Classroom] South (GS) and Sanson Life [Science] (SC) buildings,” meaning, I suppose, the quad adjacent to the Breezeway.

• “Heritage Park [Towers],” and I’m not sure where exactly this means.

• “Next to Live Oak [Pavilion].”

You can access a campus map with these locations here. No word yet on when the hammocks will be installed, although she did say there would be only one at each location at first, with more to come later.

Go Saints Owls!

SG Quote of the Week

Just as a reminder, everyone who sponsors this bill will receive their name on the bench also.

—House Speaker Alan Pollock, at the Feb. 5 Boca House meeting, prior to a vote on the “Benched” bill which will fund a 6-foot long bench in the Breezeway. Not to mention a pretty little plaque with, it seems, about two dozen SG names on it — directly after Pollock’s statement, over a dozen people raised their hands to be added to the bill which already had 14 sponsors. The bill passed unanimously.

To offer a little perspective, many bills (legislation that allocates money) only have one sponsor. Resolutions (legislation that does not involve money) usually have more sponsors. However, there’s a noticeable trend in sponsorship for bills that directly benefit SG, such as the “Comprehensive Marketing Plan” bill currently being considered, which might fund:

• engraved SG name badges…
• SG sweatshirts…
• SG polo shirts…
• “…and/or any other marketing/promotion/advertising items.”

This bill currently has 12 sponsors — and they haven’t decided how much it will even cost yet.

Compare this to the “Student Juried Art Exhibit” bill. Raised at the same meeting, it was meant to fund an annual campus art exhibit featuring student work. It has one sponsor. And it was tabled at the meeting to be discussed at a future date.

I don’t want to over-generalize or dismiss context, however; there’s a legitimate question about the legality of funding the (poorly written) latter bill which will be discussed in committees and hopefully addressed in the next meeting.

When I have time, I’ll look at a more fair (i.e. larger) sampling of legislation, which should offer more perspective.

Hello, Campaign Season

Above (click for a more legible size) are the candidates for this semester’s election, and I expect you’ll be hearing their names more than you care to in the coming weeks. As you can see, we have competitive races at the presidential level and in both Boca and Broward at the governor level. The Jupiter and Treasure Coast candidates will, I suppose, have to fend off any write-ins.

There are also five people running for vacant seats in the Boca House of Representatives, which has plenty available. With only a single vote, they’re guaranteed a seat — and they’re allowed to vote for themselves.

The presidential election could be interesting. Current Student Body Vice President Collene O’Reilly (no known relation to Bill, the political talk show host) is running alongside Boca House Rep Chuck Forbes, who was not only her opponent last year but ran at the top of the ticket. An interesting dynamic, for sure.

We also have Ayden Maher (no known relation to another Bill, the political talk show host) who has served as university-wide senator and Boca House representative running for the top job. He’s either popular or knows how to turn out the vote: he got more votes than anyone else in the (legislative office only) election last semester; in fact, he got 40 more votes than Chuck Forbes, who already had some name recognition by running for president the semester before that.

Then, we have Adam Epstein. He’s an unexpected candidate, at least for me, because I know him — that is, I know him in a non-SG context. We’ve had both graduate and undergraduate classes together, and as far as I know he’s not currently involved in SG. His running mate Ryan Ebanks, however, certainly is; Ebanks has been Boca Raton treasurer since Chris Ayala was kicked out of FAU last year.

Interestingly absent from the presidential line-up is Alex van Mecl, who is founder and president of the popular Mission Green Student Association and Student Body President Tiffany Weimar’s chief of staff, a role that in recent years has been a springboard for higher office. Perhaps he might run for president next year, whether or not he wins the Broward governorship.

Candidate List Not Finished [Updated]

Update 2: Naturally, the list comes in minutes after I posted the previous update. It’s like magic! Will post in a separate entry shortly.

Update: As of 1 p.m. I still have not received the list. E-mailed both SG adviser Heather Bishara and Chair of Elections Fred Moldt about half an hour ago and haven’t received any response. Might have to drop in after I teach class, I suppose…

Tonight was a mandatory meeting for the SG election candidates, in which all the arcane rules are laid out for them. Each candidate must endure a lecture on ethics, leadership and responsibility, then sign an agreement saying, “Yeah, yeah, I get it.”  So that when their opponents later come complaining that they used a poster two inches over regulation size and thus garnered an unfair advantage, they can be held to account, for instance.

A final list of candidates, usually available by this meeting — well, wasn’t. Student Government adviser Heather Bishara said she hadn’t finished formatting it, and promised a copy to me by noon tomorrow; I’ll hopefully be able to post it shortly thereafter.

Meanwhile, I didn’t have time to compile a list of likely candidates for the blog today, because I unexpectedly ended up in a series of meetings  for planning the SG debates. More on that to come soon, too.

By the way, you can still run for office as a write-in candidate until Feb. 15, if you’re interested. But you won’t be allowed to campaign, while everyone else is allowed to starting tonight.

The State of SG / Upcoming Coverage

See? I told you we’d be back  in mid-January at the start of February.

Frankly, there hasn’t been much going on yet — although I will mention that Student Body President Tiffany Weimar recouped some first-floor parking spots in Parking Garage 1 (by the library). Originally regular decal spots, they were converted into visitor/metered spaces last year. Weimar lobbied and got them back for us this semester.

Anyhow, things will start to pick up — starting now, the first business day following the deadline for declaring candidacy in the spring election. SG officials take a few days to review eligibility, but according to the election timeline, a list of candidates will be available at 5:30 p.m. on “Monday 2/3.” For those of you who can tell time, that translates to “Wednesday 2/3.” (Editor’s note: Someone in SG must’ve looked at a calendar over the weekend, since this error has been corrected as of 11 a.m. Monday, after I’d initially written up the post.)

So, I’ll have that official list up Thursday morning. But by Wednesday I’ll also have up a short list of likely (but not certain) contenders for executive office. I’ve heard some hearsay about who is — and surprisingly, isn’t — running, but that won’t factor into the list; there’s no real point in such speculation since the official names will be released late Wednesday.

Following that, expect an election preview in print, and perhaps some discussion here on the blog of legislation in the Boca House. The re-examination of the SG Constitution will begin in the coming weeks, too, so expect something more on that.

For those wondering what happened to the Ayala case, the short answer is: not much. It’s quickly coming up on a year since Ayala was arrested on statutory rape charges, and the case has not proceeded to trial yet. There have been a few hearings, and Ayala’s deposition — pre-trial testimony, essentially — has been taken. Another hearing is scheduled for Feb. 25, and maybe a trial date will be scheduled then. I’ll try to attend.

Ayala, who has been under house arrest since last June, also managed to get a traffic infraction in November, and a hearing is scheduled about that just days before the other hearing — whether this will impact proceedings, I don’t know yet. Stay tuned.

Lastly, I’m going to retroblog (that is, retroactively post) a couple of my favorite “SG Quotes of the Week” from this semester so far. So you didn’t miss these posts; I’m just putting them up belatedly.

SG Quote of the Week

SG Marketing Director Marcus Washington:
This is a great way to provide a service to the students of FAU. When it’s busy time in the Breezeway, there’s not enough space to sit.

— At the Jan. 29 Boca House meeting, advocating legislation to fund the placement of a (single) plastic bench in the Breezeway, similar to one already there. The existing bench was commissioned by Student Body President Ancel Pratt in 2003 with a dedication to SG engraved on it, and this one would have a similar engraving. The 6-foot bench will seat, you know, two or three people. And costs $850.

SG Quote of the Week

House Rep. Dean Hasan:
Are they, like, allowed to touch you?

Student Government Adviser Heather Bishara:
I don’t think they would want to touch you.

— At the Jan. 15 Boca House meeting, during a discussion about the possibility of “Breezeway Ambassasdors.” Remember hall monitors from middle school? Yeah, like those — but now they’re grown-ups, and they’re telling you not to skateboard / bike / golf cart through the Breezeway.

Wondering if you’ll ever see something new in this space? Here’s something a little more official than silence.

We’ll be returning in mid-January. Good luck with finals, and have a restful break.

Election Turnout About Half of Last Year’s

Click for the full-sized chart.

Observe my pretty chart.  In three of the four campus groupings, voter turnout is down by half this year. You can tell at a glance by comparing the bottom-row percentages, but I’ll crunch the straight-up number of students calculation for you as well: it’s down 47% in Boca, 46% in Broward, and 54% in Treasure Coast.

Jupiter alone maintained a similar level of voter turnout, going down only 7%. And in terms of  eligible voters, you can see from the chart they actually had a greater percentage of enrolled students voting this time around. Guess those kids over in the Honors College are more politically engaged than the rest of us.

The facts are clear, but I’m not qualified to infer the probable causes. Math major I’m not — failed Precalc as a freshman, actually. (But I got an A in it that summer.)

However, one possible factor is the registrar’s office screw-up. Even if that hadn’t happened, though, the original election flyers and what Boca House Representative Boris Bastidas called “almost non-existent advertising” might have disenfranchised some eligible voters.

Unofficial Results In — Well, Some of Them

You can view them online here. (If you don’t have Word 2007, you won’t be able to open the link. Therefore, I’ve uploaded a more user-friendly version here.)

These are the results for the Boca campus; the other campuses haven’t been posted. I don’t know why yet.

Additionally, the formatting leaves me clueless as to how many students actually voted. A minimum of 191 students (the highest number of votes for an individual, Ayden Maher) and a maximum of 3826 (the total number of votes for all candidates, which assumes every single voter voted for only one candidate. Highly unlikely.)

I’ve contacted the SG adviser and the elections chair about these points, and will post the response.

As usual, the results are “unofficial” until there’s time for people to contest the results. That’s not likely to happen given how uncompetitive the election was, but it’s always a possibility.

Edit: My e-mail has not received a response, but the full listings have now been posted here. (Still in .docx. Here’s an .rtf.)