Apathy ensues as this year’s Rep Elections draws to a close with the lowest turnout in three years.
Seth Harris Puzzlemaster
Voter turnout at this year’s Rep Election has slumped to a three-year low as only 5.44% of students bothered to cast a ballot.
This marks a continuation in the Students’ Union’s downward spiral in democratic engagement on campus with students still none the wiser about how the sabbatical team or Union staff intend to tackle this ever-growing crisis.
There is clearly a rocky road ahead for whichever poor soul is given the task of addressing this, but it wasn’t a bad result for all student groups.
The proportion of postgraduate (taught) voters skyrocketed this year to 33% from the abysmal 6.8% in 2022. It’s thought that this could be due to more lively postgraduate (taught) faculty rep elections this year, but if we are being entirely honest, we don’t have the time, resources, or data skills to verify this hunch ourselves.
Meat is off the menu at the National Union of Students (NUS) this year, with the Plant-based University (PBU) slate winning five of the nine tickets to this year’s conference and Alfie Hall securing a slot in the first round with a hefty 177 votes. The PBU campaigner immediately took to Instagram to thank his supporters (as well as The Cheese Grater Magazine) for their help in getting him elected.
While all five PBU members won their positions, it was serial candidate Yixiao Huang (as featured in last week’s Digestive) who secured the second spot, with other notable names recently featured in this publication also winning the ballot.
This year’s NUS delegation will be an interesting one, to say the least, and hacks at The Cheese Grater will be keenly watching to see what policies they intend to bring to Conference.
The Activities Zone is looking likely to be heavily sports-led after the entire ArtsUCL community failed to put forward a single candidate for either of their arts positions this year.
This isn’t exactly a great look for the arts community and as such we would like to take this opportunity to remind all the annoying theatre kids that these positions will reopen in the upcoming by-elections, in case they want to be the centre of attention both on and off stage.
Perhaps most relevant to our readers, the Media Rep race saw a landslide for Robert Delaney, who had pledged to ‘rebuild student media’ on campus by aiming to secure subsidised printing.
Rob’s message may have resonated with voters, but whether he will be able to deliver on this goal remains to be seen. If he fails in this mission, he can expect heavy criticism in our final issue of the year, which will end up being an A5 black-and-white pamphlet due to budgetary constraints.
However, not every race was as clear-cut as this.
The penultimate round of the Accommodation and Housing Officer race saw a three-way showdown with Ben Scanlan and Weining Pan neck-and-neck on 219 votes, with Maria Toigonbaeva only one vote behind with 218. Maria’s elimination ultimately allowed Ben to pick up enough transfer votes to emerge victorious.
While Ben may feel relieved to have come out on top in such a tightly fought race, he now faces one of the most difficult tasks in the Union: liaising with all the Hall Community Officers (HCO) across campus to get them to actually turn up to meetings, a job made exponentially harder by the fact that the majority of them don’t actually exist.
As reported earlier this week, 14 of the 19 HCO positions remain vacant, leaving 18 halls without democratic representation (some HCOs represent more than one hall). Unless addressed quickly, the majority of freshers will likely go without a voice in their Halls and in the Welfare Zone.
While the Graters Sketch Director is used to navigating absurd situations in his regular Mully’s performances, we will have to wait and see whether he is ready to tackle the ultimate joke that is student living standards in London.
Finally, the Student Trustee race saw 19 candidates face off for what can only be described as the most boring role available in the Students’ Union.
After 14 painful rounds, the anti-Barclays NUS-sceptic Seth Harris (who also happens to be writing this article) topped the ballot, with Angela Brown narrowly beating Adam Cleary for the undergraduate trustee position.
Despite the annoying number of posters put up by all three candidates in the Cloisters, most of the ballots had been exhausted by the final round of voting. This means that the majority of voters didn’t rank any of the final candidates anywhere in their preference list.
This isn’t a particularly thrilling endorsement for the winners, or maybe the majority of people still don’t understand how single transferable voting (STV) works. But hey, it’s not like any of this matters, since reps don’t do anything anyway… right?
Now that we have elected all the reps and officers, feel free to go and quiz your elected representatives and quote their manifestos back to them at Zone meetings this term. Here’s when and where to find them.
The Activities Zone is meeting on Monday 28 October in C3.09 at the IOE from 6-8pm. This Zone is chaired by the Activities and Engagement Officer Ana Boikova and attended by the Arts Officer, Sports Officer, Societies Officer, Volunteering Officer, all five network officers, and all 19 activities reps.
The Education Zone is meeting on Tuesday 29 October in the 221 HKR Room in Bentham House from 6-8pm. This Zone is chaired by the Education Officer Shaban Chaudhary and attended by the Research Students’ Officer, all five network officers, and all faculty reps.
The Welfare and Community Zone is meeting on Thursday 31 October in C3.09 at the IOE from 6-8pm. This Zone is chaired by the Welfare and Community Officer Rachel Lim and attended by the Accommodation Officer, International Students’ Officer, Mature Students’ Officer, Social Class & Mobility Officer, Sustainability Officer, UCL East Officer, all 19 HCOs, all five network officers, and all eight welfare reps.
Lastly, Union Executive is meeting on Monday 11 November in B06 at Drayton House from 6-8pm. This meeting is chaired by the Union President Goksu Danaci and attended by all six sabbatical officers, all five network officers, and the Sustainability Officer.
These meetings are open to all UCL students.
This article appeared in the Digestive 3
