After this upcoming election, at least nine of the ASUCD Senate seats, in addition to the president and vice president, will be members of the BOLD slate.
This is an excess that ASUCD could do without. This is not to say that BOLD or other slates are problems in and of themselves. The question is, what makes a slate a slate when they make up an overwhelming majority of a governing body? At that point, they really are senate, not BOLD.
Slates can be a great tool for promoting collaboration between senators and creating a cooperative environment around the senate table. A slate, however, is not really necessary to accomplish these things. Collaboration and cooperation should be present within ASUCD at all times, with members working closely together whether they were elected through the same slate or not.
Dissent, too, is necessary to create a well-rounded governing body, and slates, even when made up of independently voting individuals, surely inhibit this important aspect of ASUCD to some extent.
The point is not to put blame on BOLD for running nearly all this quarter’s candidates, but to ask –– where is everybody else?
It is possible that the recent rise of such a dominating slate has had a negative effect on the idea of running an independent senate campaign. With the overwhelming resources and visibility of a slate such as BOLD, some individuals considering running independent, or starting a slate of their own, could be intimidated by the relative solitude of the process.
If each member of a slate plans on winning and voting as an individual, it does not make sense to put a label on it when these individuals combined make up nearly all of the candidates. Each member of BOLD has a diverse background and vision, and it seems unnecessary to organize themselves under a single umbrella with no unique unifying quality other than matching t-shirts and the vague representation of “all communities and all students.”
In the future, we would like to see students have options when it comes to an election –- to at least have the option of a student government not run by a single slate.
