Two Carleton students have started a Facebook event encouraging voters to draw penises on their ballots instead of voting in the Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) elections.
Third-year history student Joe Ryan and second-year industrial design student Micah Rakoff-Bellman said they started the “Phallus Your Ballot” campaign because they are tired of being “harassed” by canvassers when they walk down the halls.
Ryan said he is exasperated with people approaching him in the tunnels to get him to vote. Last year, he drew a penis on his ballot.
This year, Ryan and Rakoff-Bellman made a Facebook event to see if they could get others to join them.
“We’re both sort of apathetic,” he said. “We both thought it would be pretty funny to slip in something like this and to give them a hard time.”
Seventy people have joined the Facebook event, but Ryan said he will be surprised if they all show up at the polling stations.
They said they will give a five-dollar Rooster’s gift card to the person who draws the best phallus and posts a photo of it on Facebook.
The group is “inherently stupid,” but it is understandable why a lot of students are apathetic, Ryan said.
“CUSA erected a wall between students,” he said. “It’s the way they campaign, and essentially the way it gets organized. There’s a lot of conflict.”
Rakoff-Bellman said he thought the event is a way for students to show they do not feel CUSA candidates live up to their promises.
“Every year, it’s just going to be the same thing. So why bother voting properly?” he said.
“I don’t really feel CUSA represents me as a student,” he said. “I’m not involved with any of the things they do. I don’t feel there’s any kind of presence that I’m interested in being involved in.”
Drawing inappropriate things on ballots takes away from the integrity of the election, said deputy electoral officer Kelli-Anne Day.
The CUSA election team wants to keep the number of rejected ballots down to a minimum, she said.
“The message we really want going out is that we are very focused on keeping the democratic integrity of the election to the highest degree,” Day said.
“That means just coming out, voting for who you want to vote for and calling it a day.”
There is always an issue of people thinking they’re funny and messing with the ballots in some way, chief electoral officer Sunny Cohen said.
“People would write messages to people they knew were working in the polling stations,” Cohen said. “And there’s always people writing the names of joke candidates like Batman or Spiderman.”
The elections team has been encouraging people to vote through posters, emails, and Twitter.
“We’d like as many ballots to count, so that the turn-out is meaningful and reflected properly,” Day said.
