and that’s a wrap
More posts and comments will trickle in over the coming days, but with the results announced and no appeals that we know of, our coverage is wrapping up.
In punditry.ca tradition, our congratulations to the new executive – Saulnier, LeForte, Dahn, Kurin, and the as-yet unnamed VP FO, as well as to the three new senators. I hope that you have a successful year, and that you hire a full-time staffer to do your spell checking. 
I think we had an embarrassment of riches in candidates this year; yes, each has their flaws, and we may focus on those sometimes, but we all have flaws. The DSU would have been in good hands with any of them, I feel. I was particularly excited by the unprecedented availability of information online. Perhaps those of you who were not elected will consider running for other positions, like the Board of Operations, which the DSU is advertising now.
A shout-out to the hard-working elections committee and the CRO, those unfortunate souls tasked with refereeing bickering candidates, trying to encourage students to vote, organizing the whole bloody thing, and being blamed for everything. (Do the cool kids still do shout-outs?)
Thank you of course to the pundits and commenters and tipsters who are the reason this site still exists.
punditry.ca saw 50 posts from pundits (42,000 words) and around 800 comments (67,000 words). We served over 55,000 pages to 1,500 absolute unique visitors in just over 2 weeks. If they were all Dal students, which they definitely aren’t, that would be 10% of the student body and 62% of those who voted.
Because of my continuing fetish for word clouds, I generated one for both the posts and the comments. I didn’t pay attention to plurals, but I did remove HTML tags and “dsu”. These each have 150 words, so click them to see the full-size version. Analysis is left as an exercise for the reader.
Pundit Posts Wordcloud (click for full-size)
Word Cloud of punditry.ca comments (click for full version)
punditry.ca will be back next year, because someone’s gotta do it. Speak to any current pundit if you want to be involved next year; recruitment will start in 9 months or so. This will be my last post of the year, so I thank you for reading and bid you a slightly awkward but nevertheless polite farewell.
I love that “Eric” and “Snow” are about the same size as any candidate’s name in the comments word cloud. Also the only non-candidate names I could find.
@John Doucette
Between John Hillman and Sarah Amyotte, I’m surprised my name isn’t dominating the clouds entirely. =)
@John Doucette
The glorious “Smit” overlooks all others upon a throne at the center of the very top of the cloud.
(Eric Snow. Eric Snow. Eric Snow.)
Wow 10% voter turn out. Looks like the DSU is doing a great job of serving our student population. They should look in to only taking the DSU fees from people who vote because I bet everyone who didn’t vote doesn’t want them wasting our money.
Pretty sure voter turnout was higher than 10%… I know this because I read the article above which told me that if all the unique visitors to this site were Dalhousie students it would constitute 10% of the total population… or 62% of those who voted in the DSU election… Just saying.
Voting was between 15-16%
@Math Is Hard: Fabulous reply.
@Smit: The next 12 months will be so boring… time to take off the RSS feed and find something more exciting to do…
@Dalocracy Your logic is infallible.
None the less, if the country had a 16% voter turn out we would have a serious issue on our hands. It should be no different on the university level.
@Dalocracy
I agree
Exposure on many levels is coming
More questions arising from students is occuring
Success?
@Dalocracy
If your point is that 16% is lower than we’d all like to see, and that this is sad, I agree entirely. Thank you for your penetrating insight… now, solutions?
If your point is that federal government and a student union should be the same, I disagree entirely. They aren’t even really comparable.
@Mike Smit
The comparison was only meant for voter turn out and nothing more.
In terms of solutions, there is a good amount of responsibility on the DSU’s end to make sure students know how much of a benefit it is actually having a DSU. I know that the majority of people I talk to have no idea what the DSU’s purpose is and how they actually help out the student population.
What do you think should be done?
@Dalocracy
I could bounce the question to someone else, perhaps an actual Dal student, but I’ll actually offer some thoughts.
For the record, I believe that voter turnout is not a reliable indicator of the relevance of an organization, or even of the perceived relevance of an organization. Some other time we can discuss why I think this is provably false. However, I don’t dispute that a lot of students have no idea what the DSU does or is, so it’s worth talking about, but I’ll do it separately.
1. Voter turnout sucks. It makes me sad. Voter turnout at universities Canada-wide is poor. St FX was heralded as a Miracle School for hitting 60%, and that was after a concerted effort and substantial investment, and is a priority that they are disputing. The big universities range from about 3%-20% (but they don’t all vote online). The little big universities, like Dal, range from 15%-25%. In Nova Scotia, Acadia SU hovers around 40%, SMUSA struggled toward 15% this year. In short: the DSU is not alone.
Of course the problem goes beyond student unions. A quick Google for some numbers showed that turnout among 18-24 year olds ranges from 30-40% in the US during a presidential year, and under 20% for mid-term elections. In Canada, it’s around 40%. Is the federal government only twice as relevant to youth as the DSU? Again: the DSU is not alone.
Why don’t they vote? No idea. When I don’t, it’s because I don’t know the candidates or don’t really care who runs, and figure someone else should make the decision. When they hold a referendum I have an opinion on, I vote.
We do, however, have some idea of why they DO vote. Last year, the DSU surveyed students who voted; 42% completed the survey. Of those respondents, 32% were acquainted with a candidate but had no involvement with the DSU; 6% were involved with the DSU but didn’t know a candidate, and 16% were both. Their motivations are, I think, fairly easy to understand. A surprising 46% had no DSU involvement and knew no candidates personally, but voted anyway. Why? Most first heard about the election from a candidate who encouraged them to go vote (43%), or from friends who ARE involved (19%). 10% first heard from the email encouraging them to vote. Given that we know the email went to everyone, but that the exposure of friends/candidates is limited by space and time, personal connections are far more likely to attract students to vote. I theorize that seeing the DSU as people just like you and me, instead of a nameless, faceless organization is valuable.
2. On relevance.
I’ll start by saying in my personal view, it is far more important that the DSU *be* useful than that it *appear* relevant.
The DSU as an organization supports the existence many other groups on campus, many of whom have great voter turnout – the Engineers hit nearly 50%, the law students broke 80%. If you accept voter turnout as an indicator of relevance, I think it is more important that the DSU continues to support the smaller groups that are able to have a closer connection with students. Beyond a certain size, a personal connection is very, very hard to establish. That’s why you have councillors from these groups that make up the DSU Council: hopefully you get better connections with a more diverse range of students than any executives or staff members could achieve.
Of course, appearing relevant is valuable, because it makes people happy explicitly. There are some easy things to do, some of which are being done and some of which aren’t. It’s not like the DSU isn’t trying to communicate with students, it just doesn’t always go that well. The biggest let down right now is the website. Hopefully the new one has better content than the old one, and isn’t just a whitewash. I don’t know why “What the DSU does for me” isn’t there, or why the annual report isn’t more obvious. I personally complained a few years ago because the student fee breakdown had disappeared; most students don’t know that only half of the money they give the DSU goes to general DSU operations. Forums for discussing issues might also help.
The DSU has tried focus groups, classroom talks, mass brainstorming sessions, monthly emails, and so on. There’s always more it can do (I like Debogorski’s polling,referendum,and debate system idea), but there are also limits. You can lead a student to information about the DSU, but you can’t make him or her give a shit. “To learn what the DSU does for you or does with your money, go to this website” seems pretty reasonable to me. Hopefully some day soon, you’ll be able to.
@Dalocracy LAWYERED.
@mike smit
you never shared your thoughts behind your predictions!
I think it’s neat to note that the Engineers hit nearly 50%. This is reflected in the fact that the two races that Chris Saulnier and I ran in had the lowest percentage of spoilt ballots. Mine was at 4.4% (my Engineering society had roughly 50% turnout), and Chris’ was 4.5% (his society had slightly lower turnout). I think from this data alone, it’s safe to say many engineers voted only for the engineers, and maybe a couple of the other Senate candidates to make 3, and spoiled every other ballot. Having the engineering societies, law students, and grad students all run elections at the same time may have helped the election achieve the meagre turnout it did.
I think what the DSU, as a whole, needs to do is be more active in supporting societies. If we can make the DSU website, rather than Facebook, the go-to tool for event info at Dal, then I think we’ll see an increase in participation. If we can better use societies to disseminate information, then I think we’ll be better off too. People listen to those that they know. Not everyone in the engineering society knows me personally, but most of them seem to know what I do (make class announcements, edit the Sextant, and sit on DSU Council). I think when I make an announcement, there’s more relevance to it than if Shannon Zimmerman showed up and did it, because most of them don’t know who she is.
I think that idea can be spread to societies. People may be involved in Water Polo, Tea Drinking, Israel Awareness, Table Tennis, or whatever. We need to make those societies a two-way street. We support them, they support us. If Kevin Chong told his table tennis club that Candidate X helped their society out by doing something, I’m sure they’d all vote.
That’s the important thing. Not creating big ideas, new websites, and grand schemes. We need to invert the DSU and create a bottom-up rather than top-down structure. Communication would flow down channels from Council/the Exec to societies, then individuals. Give the societies a reason to promote us (because we help them, so we need to do it well.)
This post was wayyy longer than anticipated. So, a summary: the DSU Exec has no hope of connecting to the average student. They do have a hope of connecting with 30 councillors and fewer than 187 society president, who have a hope of connecting with the members below them, and that’s how we can promote the DSU and make it cool and relevant.
I agree, in fact I’d say it’s a nice elaboration on my earlier point, with one exception: I think the DSU *is* designed for two-way flows of information, but that sometimes people forget that. I wouldn’t try to characterize it as top-down or bottom-up, as long as information is flowing.
In terms of encouraging turnout, the DSU should consider giving grants to societies who have the best turnout (as a percentage). This is easy to track and could encourage more interest in at least the elections.
Oh, also an aside: law students run their elections independently of the DSU elections, though with the same software.
@Mike Smit
Oh. I thought it was on the same ballot as with the engineers, who have their own CRO and rules, but opted to run the voting periods concurrently. Thanks for the clarification!