Election Anonymity - What’s the Point?

This year the Union Election process has significantly changed; there is no longer a list of candidates standing for each position and instead the complete list will be announced once nominations are complete.

According to the Deputy Returning Officers this change has been brought about to make the election “more accessible and more democratic”, and to “encourage people to put themselves forward for any position they may be interested in without being put off by learning about other prospective candidates”. The reasoning presumably being that a ‘Big Name’ candidate may put off some prospective candidates from running in the first place.

While more candidates may run without the knowledge of these ‘Big Names’, any candidate who would not have run due to this will simply pull out once nominations have closed and been announced. Indeed on the 3rd of March, when the candidates are corralled into a lecture theatre to find out for the first time who’s standing, I fully expect there to be a significant drop in the numbers.

While this isn’t necessarily a problem, it seems to be a bit of a waste of time for everyone involved. Candidates sitting on the fence may even consider this from the offset and still never run.

Of course there are benefits to the anonymity, to start with it may help avoid the situation where a position is uncontested (or contested by a poor candidate) and is taken up by someone looking for an easy win. Of course there’s nothing wrong with trying to stop this, and indeed candidates who carry out such a move may be less likely to treat the roles with the appropriate respect. This may also impact the elections negatively however, since many of the Constituent Union positions often have no candidates whatsoever standing for them, until such a candidate steps forward. In these situations having a candidate is better than not having one, and the change will result in a rise in the number of positions unfilled following the elections. This will in turn lead to more work for the existing committees as they rush to find suitable candidates for a follow-up election.

Finally, if you’re going to make the candidacy secret, enforce it. The article in this week’s Felix naming some of the candidates should not be allowed to be published. All this is achieving is giving extra publicity to those candidates with connections to the various student media outlets. So candidates most integrated with the Union are getting their name out far in advance of those whom the change is supposed to encourage to run. While the candidates are prohibited from actively campaigning in this time, the name recognition boost is still desirable; being the first name people have heard of standing for a position could potentially tip a few votes in your favour. In previous elections the student media outlets didn’t report on who was standing till after nominations closed, and while this information was entirely available online the majority of the student body were unlikely to be checking. This time round names will be plastered on thousands of copies of Felix around campus weeks before their official announcement.

While I respect attempts to broaden the field when it comes to the elections, and the need to avoid the same types of people running again and again it is my opinion that the changes will not work in this way, and in fact could damage one of the best things our Union runs.

Good luck to all those standing in the Big Elections, and I implore anyone considering standing to go for it.