Voting For Meaningless Things

I'm about as apathetic and disconnected as anyone could possibly be from my school "community". When it comes time to vote for student government, I tend to bypass it without a second thought. Today, as a graduating senior, I participated in the student government election for the first time. This brings me to today's topic: Voting For Meaningless Things

Last night an acquaintance of mine indirectly asked me to vote for him in the SGA(Student Government Association? That's just a guess because I really don't know what it represents) election. He sent me a link to a rather embarrassing rap filled with terrible beatboxing and uninspired rhymes about his candidacy. I somehow managed to watch the entire thing and not pick up a single idea from it except "VOTE FOR ME!" which I gather was implied rather than explicit, though I could be wrong because I remember very little about it.

Skip to today and I get the reminder email to vote that any well run campaign will generate. This is followed by a personal IM a few hours later. A nice touch that spoke well of his suitability for the position, Vice President of Communication. After dinner I go to the voting area set up in the student center. The voting area was a collection of four tables featuring laptops. Votes were placed by filling out a Google Docs form. On a side note, this is an incredibly insecure system for voting and HIGHLY vulnerable to manipulation, but that's a topic for another day.

The results of this election do not affect me. By the time this board is seated, I'll be long gone from this dreadful place. Frankly, I shouldn't even be allowed to vote. But since I can, my approach to the voting is as frivolous as the results.

This brings me to my two main points:

1. Randomly picking candidates

First, randomly picking candidates. I know I'm not the only one who does this when faced with a slate of unknown choices. While I almost always have the choice of abstaining from that particular decision, I like to make a random or arbitrary choice. The reason being that each candidate has risked something in their candidacy whether its time or reputation or what have you. I think risk takers should have the certainty of being rewarded or punished. Since I know nothing about any of them, I figure giving each one a chance to get my vote is the best I can do at that point. Sometimes I vote for the person with the most interesting name. Other times I'll close my eyes and point. The criteria is different each time.

Some people would call this behavior irresponsible. You'll get no argument from me. It's highly irresponsible and it's always possible that I'll end up electing a Dodger fan to a position of power. That said, I'll continue to do it anyway as a matter of principle. Risk takers deserve that certainty.

2. Abstaining from uncontested positions

Whenever I see an uncontested position I'll refuse to vote. I am of the belief that a contest without two or more potential outcomes isn't a contest at all. Whenever this happens, I think there should be a fictitious opponent, say Bo Placé.

If the actual candidate can't defeat a cardboard cutout in an election, they don't deserve the position.