So on campus, ASUC elections have been going on, now in the 5th step of a 6-step process. The first involves political parties and the in-fighting that ensues when trying to figure out who to announce in your executive slate. The second is this announcement of the slate and the anticipation of what these people can bring to Cal. The third is the campaign, which ranges from the political forums to shaking hands with the electorate or giving speeches in the middle of class. The fourth involves voting. Duh. The fifth involves in-fighting among the parties. They all accuse each other of dirty campaigning and sue each other to get them disqualified. Finally, the 6th is the announcement of who won the voting once all the lawsuits go away.

To review, the first went to the last minute as Cal-SERVE, the dominant party of the executive branch, did not announce until the last possible day. The announcement of the executive slates was met with surprise as a new, supposedly non-partisan, party formed called BEARS-United, Student Action turned to independent outsiders to fill its slate, and Cal-SERVE chose to use staffers of its top people.

Now, the campaign. As you know, I routinely stand up to the CalPIRG people because they are weak environmentalists who simply have clipboards and stickers and can easily be scared away. One of them was my friend, and well, not only was he weak, he was such an idiot I didn't know why they would give him a clipboard to begin with. ASUC campaigners are different beasts. They've got big signs with wooden stakes they can beat you with. So then it's a matter of staying away from them. To many, voting for these people involves personality, not the issues they're talking about. I've been here 4 years and I can honestly tell you I haven't seen ASUC do anything extraordinary. Only the things they're supposed to do like give out money to student groups, which they can't even do correctly. When my friend ran for, and won, Executive Vice President a couple of years back, he ran on some promises that never happened and even found himself in trouble with allocating money for food. Food! This is what the ASUC debates all the time??? Even the President that year had some ambitious One Campus idea to unite everyone as a force to bring about real change, but that never happened. The MLK Student Union sits in disarray. ASUC is in debt all the time now, being helped by funds it doesn't routinely tap and a small pardon from the University. Then during campaign season, empty promises are made to fix everything that is wrong, but by now, it's hard to believe them, which is why you'll see heavy campaigning in the dorms and toward freshmen. They're naive like that.

Once you get through the two weeks of that, you finally get the voting. Like ASUC, voting gets off on the wrong foot every year. The first year had paper ballots, no problems but awfully slow. It takes a long time for Cal students to count votes I guess. So some brilliant people had the idea to use computers. What an idea! But now, it seems that may be bringing more problems than their worth. Costs pushed $100,000 last year when they budgeted considerably less. Computers broke down, poll workers never showed up, etc. After a year of planning, this year's is not without problems either. Servers aren't being turned on, computers are breaking down again, students aren't getting authenticated because of their Tele-Bears status, etc. They extended voting but there's no count on how many were discouraged from voting.

So right now, we're at Step 5. It's the desperate step for many as party members accuse each other of campaign violations serious enough to disqualify entire parties in order to win. Even if it means everyone is disqualified and Squelch! becomes the dominant party on campus. This year, Student Action fired the first shot, charging Cal-SERVE with 4 counts of violations including taking advantage of an ASUC sponsored event, significantly blocking a students' right-of-way to class, and even simply flyering over other groups' flyers. Cal-SERVE is secretive on what they have, but we'll find out soon enough. It doesn't usually work but it almost did a couple of years back when Student Action was barred before the voting only to come back later on. More details can be found on Calstuff.

Step 6 is the results. And to those who win, congrats. You'll be inheriting an organization in such disarray, it will only be doing harm to your future political career.