Making the Right Choices
The way we conduct the ASB elections is flawed. By David Ye
D
uring last year’s ASB elections, crowds of people were lining up in the quad to receive their ballot and cast their votes, and I was one of them. I remember all the Snapchat stories saying “vote for this person” on a daily basis. I thought it was great that students were actively campaigning, but I noticed that they were only campaigning for the candidate that they were friends with. This social preference led me to become extremely frustrated with the student body. The ASB elections aren’t a popularity contest, and we need to stop treating them as such. However, I do think that the elections, to a certain extent, are irrelevant in the general AHS experience. The only noticeable everyday occurrence that our vote affects is the voice we hear on the loudspeaker, but even that is trivial. You might be asking yourself “Why is this guy getting so fed up over who I vote for if he just called the elections irrelevant?” What this shows is that people don’t vote
for who they think is best for the school, which negates the whole point of having a school election, which is to prepare us for the presidential elections. In the presidential elections, there are things that running candidates do to persuade people to vote for them, such as making campaign speeches and debating on important topics with other running candidates. Instead of these, all we get are videos that are 30 seconds long at most where the candidates say why they deserve the spot they’re running for. Even with these videos, students are left to ponder what the candidates will do for them and why they deserve their vote. Instead of the running candidates saying why they would be good for their desired position, they should publicly address problems at the school and what they plan to do to fix those problems. Doing so would allow students to get to know the candidates and their stances on said problems, and they
can vote for who they think took the better stance - just like in presidential elections. From these campaign strategies, the ASB president wouldn’t be someone just reading off announcements and posting dance polls on Twitter, but someone that we can believe in; someone we can trust to solve problems on campus. However, I’m not going to vote this year; it wouldn’t really affect me, since I won’t be here next year. However, who we vote for does affect us, as well as others. By participating in the ASB elections, we should be preparing ourselves for the presidential elections. If we aren’t voting properly here (and we aren’t), then we’ll never be ready to vote anywhere, and the problems we have with the school (and the nation) will never be handled, let alone resolved. •
Photo Illustration | Alexis-May Go
32
COLUMN
