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The calm before the storm

It’s the final weekend before AMS election results are announced. Candidates are taking time out of the limelight to rest…

By Jesse Ferreras , in Blogs UBC Outsider , on January 20, 2008

It’s the final weekend before AMS election results are announced. Candidates are taking time out of the limelight to rest up before the last stretches of their campaigns.

Despite that, I hope a relaxing weekend is not being enjoyed by Paul Gibson-Tigh, the Voter-Funded Media (VFM) administrator, who really should be tackling his job instead.

VFM is a contest held in tandem with the AMS Elections that allows voters to decide which media outlet did the best job of covering the elections. Through a donation from Mark Latham, VFM’s founder, there’s a prize pool of $8,000 and voters decide which outlet deserves the kitty.

Voting started yesterday for everything except VFM. The proper channels that make it possible to vote in the contest have not done their job, as there is no online link that allows you to vote for the contest winners.

Mr. Gibson-Tigh offers this explanation to the UBC Insiders: “VFMs are not on the online ballot as of yet, because the deadline for entering the contest was [Friday] at 4pm. We didn’t want to disadvantage the last minute entrants (of which there were a few) so we couldn’t complete the list until the registration period had closed.”

This is yet another of a handful of bureaucratic lapses that have plagued the AMS elections from the start. The deadline for joining the contest was the day that voting started – if you waited that long to join, you only had a day to have a chance at winning the contest. I don’t see why earlier competitors should have votes denied them on the early days of voting when slackers decide to join at the last minute.

If you ever needed to provide a good case why students should not run elections, this would be it.

Comments


  • To be fair, the AMS has had a long streak of successful elections administrators. Of the eight that I have seen either up close or from afar, this one is the worst. Even the most underwhelming EAs have at least not been f***ups.

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