Breaking down the trends

Running a student election at a university as big as ours is no small feat, and the University Board of Elections deserves a great deal of praise for a job (mostly) quite well done.
That said, this year’s encouraging voter turnout was solely a product of the honor referendum’s presence on the ballot. As Geoff Skelley points out, turnout trends over the past five or so years directly vary according to whether or not a controversial referendum is included in the election that year. The record for overall turnout still belongs to 2005 (with 40 percent), a year in which students were asked both to vote on an amendment changing the honor code and on an opinion poll querying if they were interested in honor finding alternatives to the single sanction. This year’s numbers compare quite favorably to non-referenda years, and similarly to years with referenda on the ballot.This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be encouraged by this year’s 38% turnout. Any such year of high student participation is cause for celebration. It just means we need to be realistic about the context of voting. Certain proposals will always garner more attention than others, and amendments that immediately impact student self-governance (like the honor code) are far more important to students than actually deciding which students get to fill the chairs of Student Council, the University Judiciary Committee, etc. Since amendments are very clear-cut in terms of their effects while candidates can only effect so much unilateral change without voter approval, this trend is both understandable and to some extent desirable. Ideally turnout would be near 100 percent for each election; this never happens even on a national level in the U.S., so we temper our expectations accordingly. All things considered, honor amendments are among the more important of electoral decisions students will have to make regarding self-governance during their time here.
Another trend that would be interesting to dissect is the turnout breakdown by year. First-years and second-years trumped the upperclassmen with 59% and 52% turnout, respectively. Third-years had 49% while fourth-years had 37%. The overall undergraduate rate was 49% and the overall graduate student rate was 16%. The undergraduate breakdown by year is curious yet predictable. Younger students are probably both more likely to have free time to vote and to see that these decisions will affect them the most (as they have the most time left at the University). Older students are probably more likely to be busier, to have become disenchanted with what they see as inaction on the part of student leaders, and to realize that electoral decisions will impact them for only a short time before they graduate. Master’s and doctoral students appear to just feel far more apathetic to student self-governance than undergrads. Again, this is fairly predictable, although even more effort to drive up the graduate school turnout rate would be a great thing. In short, we should all take pride in the fact that, by and large, student self-governance is prioritized by enough people to have meaningful elections. This is nothing to take for granted. We just also must understand the nature of any student election and search for ways of improvement that account for these inherent limitations.