Go vote

For the last three issues of The Crimson White, the editorial board has endorsed some of the various candidates running for SGA office. We like to think our views and opinions helped you make your own decision, but ultimately, the decision of who to vote for - even the decision of whether to vote at all - is still left up to you.

And that's our message for today: You have a decision to make. Today marks the last day for voting in SGA elections. Will you vote? Or will you, like many of the students at this University, sit idly by as the campus political process whirls by?

At the end of the day, we do not care which candidate gets your vote. After all, that's a personal choice colored by a person's thoughts and ideas of this University, where it's going and how the SGA should represent the student body as a whole. A student could vote for Cason Kirby, Stephen Saucier or Wonder Woman - just as long as they vote for someone.

Students who refuse to vote just perpetuate a cycle of apathy. Low turnout means we get rehashed ideas year after year. Low turnout means we get candidates looking to fill out a resume rather than real leaders with visionary ideas. Low turnout means we get the student governance we deserve rather than the SGA we desperately need.

There's no reason why we can't have competitive elections. In a campus of nearly 25,000 students, there are viewpoints from every possible point of the spectrum. If this campus was committed to student government, we could have elections centered on policy debates instead of an archaic greek versus independent divide. We could have elections that mean something.

If our great-grandfathers had worked at The CW, they would have complained about the Machine when it was born in the early 1900s. A hundred years later, nothing has changed. Our forefathers at this newspaper called it "the Machine" because it worked. And it still works to this day.

By not voting, this student body is condemning itself to elections that are little more than farce, but in focusing on the greek community's influence on elections, we don't address the underlying problem of voter apathy.

So, on this last day of voting in the SGA elections, let's put aside that age-old fight with the Machine. Let's pick up the ballot, and try voting for someone - anyone - for a change.