The voter turnout in the 2019 Carleton University Students’ Association (CUSA) elections saw a 2.6 per cent decrease from last year’s byelection despite dropping the writ two months prior and an increased commitment to election advertisement.
This year, 7,783 votes were cast from an undergraduate student population of nearly 26,000 this year, representing 27.8 per cent of the undergraduate body as compared to 30.4 per cent in the byelection last year.
The highest voter turnout in the past four years was in the 2017 elections with 37.2 per cent of eligible voters coming out to vote.
David Oladejo, CUSA’s president, said he is disappointed by this year’s voter turnout.
“I don’t know if because there was less drama, people didn’t hear that much about the elections,” he said.
“Personally, I am disappointed by it because we started all promotions earlier, we had all the changes to our bylaws, and we put in a bunch of steps to not only increase the involvement of candidates in the elections, but also just to increase the involvement of a student and a voter.”
According to Oladejo, the low voter turnout was not the result of an earlier election.
“I would’ve expected that early elections would have made turnout better because, if not, we would be going into midterm season and getting closer to reading week,” he said. “At that point people are “just so plugged in to school that they don’t really have time to wait around and get involved.
Oladejo said the elections this year were smoother than the last.
“It was a lot smoother because there was one election, and I think this year, there was a lot more focus on the actual policy that was being put out and the candidates,” he said.
“Last year there was a lot of negative campaigning. I think this was one of the healthier elections we’ve had in the past few years—maybe that’s just because there were just two slates. Overall, the process went very smoothly.”
According to Lily Akagbosu, CUSA’s current vice-president (student issues) and CUSA president-elect for the coming year, this year’s election was smoother because information was readily available.
“With the writ dropping in December, we introduced Elections 101 workshops, creating awareness of the elections for those who may be interested in running, and actually got the university to send out an email to let people know about the elections,” she said. “With those steps that CUSA took, we definitely en- gaged a lot more students.”
This year’s elections saw the Students First slate win all six executive positions.
Oladejo said slates are important for teamwork.
“I think slates are important because you have a general idea of what you’re trying to accomplish, and you come up with your ideas together as a team,” he said. “That way, when you’re in office, you work knowing the individual portfolio goals that people have, but the team goals that you have as a whole.”
“But there is a lot of room for debate,” he added.
According to Mehdi Bouchentouf, the candidate for vice-president (finance) from the Connected Carleton slate, said that slates “corporatize our elections.”
“It’s no longer about your ideas or your perspective or your experiences, but it’s actually more about your branding,” he said. “It is very difficult to bring forward six people who have the incentive to run.”
“I’d like to see changes, hopefully eliminating slates,” he added. “I think we need to stop the corporatization of these elections and make it ‘my idea versus your idea,’ ‘my experiences versus your experiences’—and not ‘my brand versus your brand.’”
—With files from Temur Durrani
Photo from files
