Written by Corbett Gildersleve, SFU Alumnus
We’re only a few months away from being inundated with multi-coloured posters full of smiling faces, meaningless buzzwords, and bland slate names also known as the Simon Fraser Student Society Board of Director elections!
If you’re already a board member, you’ve probably started planning your campaign around November last year. If you are a newbie, I’d be surprised if you even thought about it yet. That’s why newbies rarely win.
Do non-board candidates have a chance? The last few years have had low candidate turnout, especially for executive positions, so the numbers are too skewed to say for certain.
But incumbent candidates have a distinct advantage due to experience, knowledge, and access to information. When multiple incumbent candidates combine their respective advantages by joining together in a slate, it only compounds that head start.
A non-incumbent candidate has two different routes they can go: form a slate of their own or go independent. Each requires a well-thought-out approach, but victory isn’t impossible. It would be great if this year was different from past elections, allowing for a more competitive race between the incumbents and non-incumbents. So, if you’re a new face who wants to run for office against an incumbent, here’s what you need to know.
A slate is a political group with a shared set of views, goals, and messages. Slates can save a lot of time and resources by co-ordinating advertising, campaigning, etc. Other shared benefits come at the ballot box: if someone votes for you, they’ll also probably vote for your slate members. Of course, the reverse can also be true, in that your slate could be punished by the electorate if you have any pariahs.*
Incumbents, meanwhile — people who already have positions on the SFSS — are so powerful due to experience and access to information. They have the experience of previously running in and winning an election. They know the SFSS bureaucratic system and what each position is like. They know the current state of society projects like the Student Union Building and stadium, and they have access to more information than regular members.
It’s almost impossible for a newbie to be able to come up with effective policy ideas, especially financial ones, with what little information they have access to. Combine that experience with others in the form of a slate and it’s easy to see why independents can’t compete. How do you get around this?
Let’s say you want to run your own slate. First, realize that an election is not simply a popularity contest; it’s a numbers game. You need to have a diverse set of candidates who are known and liked. If you’re a slate that is primarily made up of just one demographic, you’re going to end up running short of votes. Student electoral apathy seems to be uniformly distributed, so don’t count on getting a high turnout from a small base.
No, what you need are candidates from multiple student areas: gender, ethnicity, interests, knowledge, etc. Not only will this give you a group with a variety of perspectives, experience, and ideas, it will also give you a wide set of demographics to earn votes from.
You also need each candidate to convince their group(s) to vote for your slate members. For example, you have a full slate of 16 candidates, if each faculty representative can get an average of 100 unique votes for each at-large and executive candidates (since everyone can vote for them), then those people have each received 800 votes. And, if the remaining six execs and two at-larges can pull in 200 unique votes each for themselves and each other, than they’ve gained 1,600 votes each.
That gives the execs and at-larges 2,400 votes, which would give you a pretty solid chance of winning. No one received more than 1,200 votes in the last election and the more people who run for a position, the more likely vote splitting will happen, which might be to your benefit. So you and your slate members need to work your asses off to get your base voting.
If you do decide to go it alone, you’ll have to know your stuff, be visible, and hustle for the whole campaign period to gain the votes. Only one non-incumbent independent candidate, Enoch Weng, has become president since 2011; Weng benefited from vote splitting, a sizable personal network, and clear messaging. Also, while you can’t campaign until the week before voting starts, you can talk with people about issues, do research, attend board and committee meetings, and ask questions.
To summarize: If you’re a newbie thinking of running for the SFSS Board, you’ll need to account for a board-run slate. Find compatible slate members across multiple student areas and demographics that are known and liked to give you the largest possible set of potential voters. Co-operate to win votes not just for yourselves, but for your fellow slate members, especially the at-large and executive positions. If you can do that, you’re on your way to being a strong competitor.
*From 2005–7, almost every candidate ran on a slate. Slates lead by incumbents tended to do well, while independent candidates did not. For the 2007 election, the board banned slates to reduce partisanship on the board, and to encourage candidates to run for their preferred position rather than for whichever spot on their slate was open.
However, this didn’t really make much of a difference. Slates or no slates, executive positions still often went to an incumbent. The total number of executive, faculty, and at-large candidates, meanwhile, fluctuated just as much as in the past.
When slates were revived for the 2014 election, two incumbent-led slates competed for student votes and the results showed it, with the board made up of both slates and two independent candidates. However, the last three elections were dominated by one board slate where almost every incumbent ran on that one slate.
Also, the last two elections had especially poor candidate numbers, with many executive positions running uncontested. I can’t speak for the 2016, but the 2015 board — speaking from personal experience serving on it — was just as partisan, even with the majority of seats going to one slate.
