By any account, the 4,507 votes cast in Tuesday’s student elections were a paltry showing. What is less clear, however, is why students care so little this year, when so much at UNC is at stake.
In a normal year, this apathy might not be particularly hard to parse. And if UNC students think student government is irrelevant, it might be better for them to abstain than to cast uninformed votes.
But when one juxtaposes Tuesday’s turnout with the criticisms lately leveled against student government, the indifference is truly perplexing.
This school year, UNC students have been vocal critics of the decision-making process at all levels of the UNC system, most notably as it related to tuition hikes.
It’s embarrassing for a student body clamoring for more direct involvement in this process to then turn around and fail to vote in its own elections. If administrators don’t take students seriously at UNC, this might have something to do with it.
To be sure, there were a number of factors at play when students voted (or didn’t vote) last week. Enthusiasm for this year’s race was probably tempered by the widespread disillusionment last year’s absurd election engendered. Or perhaps students just didn’t find this year’s candidates compelling enough to take the five minutes to vote.
It is all but impossible to disentangle the contributing factors: student apathy, a weak candidate field, general ineffectiveness of student government or a lack of power granted to student representatives by the powers that be at UNC.
Regardless of which of these factors came first in the vicious cycle of student apathy, it is students who can begin changing it. High turnout sends a message to all parties involved — candidates, voters and onlookers — that the issues are serious. And unlike almost everything else, this metric is entirely within students’ control.
