Elections Board correct to not recognize USAC slates

  Michael Weiner Weiner is a fourth-year
history and political science student. His column analyzing issues
of interest to the UCLA community runs on Mondays. E-mail [email protected].

The existence of political slates in student government should
be readily apparent to any member of the UCLA community who braved
the gauntlet of candidates and fliers that staged its annual campus
takeover during last week’s Undergraduate Students
Association Council elections.

As usual, those seeking office asserted not only their
individual goals and qualifications, but also their association
with other candidates of a similar stripe. Clad in blue or red
T-shirts as the case may be, campus politicos most often approached
voters with the admonition, “Vote S.U.R.E.” or
“Vote Student Empowerment!” Less common was the simpler
““ albeit more selfish ““ request to “Vote for
me.”

Everyone on campus knows about the existence of slates ““
everyone, that is, other than the group of people that seemingly
should. The USAC Elections Board, the student government committee
that administers the annual contest, does not recognize slates. It
never has, and it has shown no indication in recent years that it
ever will. And as we have seen with particular saliency in this
year’s election, unless someone is an in-house commission
candidate, it is very difficult to win without the support of a
slate.

Various campus activists and editorial boards of this newspaper
have called periodically for the E-Board to take its collective
head out of the sand and officially recognize the existence of
slates. That way, they claim, slates could be regulated and
prevented from skirting around provisions of the election code,
particularly those which govern campaign expenditures.

In a way, the S.U.R.E. slate attempted to force the
E-Board’s hand by using quoted middle names to distinguish
its candidates on the ballot. But with only two of its candidates
elected, that clever little strategy isn’t likely to spur a
reassessment of the election code.

In any case, I want to argue against E-Board recognition of
slates. These loose political associations play a destructive role
in student government by enshrining narrow interest group jockeying
in the political culture of this university and they serve to
prevent more widespread participation in campus politics.

The first mistake anyone can make in evaluating the slate system
is to compare slates to political parties. They are not the
same.

National political parties, while certainly representing a
series of interests, have their own independent bases of support.
The Democratic Party may advocate for unions, environmentalists,
teachers and trial lawyers, but it is not dependent on those groups
for its entire membership.

In contrast, a slate is almost entirely rooted in the groups
that formed it. In the case of Student Empowerment!, and its
predecessors Students First! and Praxis, those groups are minority
student advocacy groups such as the African Student Union and Asian
Pacific Coalition. In the case of the S.U.R.E. slate, those groups
are the Greek system and members of the On-Campus Housing
Council.

Neither slate, nor any other incarnation we have seen in recent
years (e.g., Viable Alternative, Nexus, Sanity ’98), is
anything more than a conglomeration of the groups that came
together to run candidates for office. Thus, slates bear a much
stronger resemblance to loose coalitions than to independently
powerful political parties.

Herein lies the problem. Because slates lack an independent base
of support, because they are not self-supporting organizations that
can be joined, and eventually led, by any student who agrees with
their ideological positions, slates can only wholly represent the
interest groups whose leaders almost invariably become the
slates’ standard-bearers.

At UCLA, and indeed at many comparable universities across the
country, those interest groups can be roughly divided into two
camps: minority advocacy groups and the Greek system. These are the
only segments of the campus with consistent and independent bases
of support. And these are two groups of people whose ideologies and
interests are considered to be diametrically opposed to one
another, whether or not they actually are.

Clearly, this system leaves out a lot of students, perhaps the
majority. And lacking a slate with which to identify, many of those
students feel disconnected from the government that is supposed to
represent them and that they support with their mandatory fees.
This is not to say that some of these students do not align
themselves with one or another slate, occasionally even becoming
slate-sponsored candidates.

But in general, the slate system is anti-democratic. Non-Greek
and non-SAG students cannot possibly acquire the same political
voice as their “slated” counterparts. This is one
reason why the vast majority of undergraduates ““ 80 percent
according to this year’s turnout numbers ““ choose not
to participate at all. Slates are not good for democracy and the
E-Board is right to withhold its official sanction.