The Professorial Boardroom has whispered – Fit for Honi will win this year’s Honi race, and will be editing this paper in 2020. After a series of mishaps on the part of their opponents, Cream – paedophile apologia, a mutiny, and two further drop outs to name a few – Fit have taken the editorship with wins at almost all booths across the two days.
Our exit polls saw Fit consistently ahead of Cream over all three days of polling. Campaigners were somewhat absent during pre-poll on Tuesday morning, but held the line on most booths over the next two days. Morale appeared to be consistently high for the ticket, likely because their opponent lost 30 per cent of their ticket only a few days before polling began.
Honi reported on Monday morning that JP Baladi of Cream had made comments suggesting support of convicted paedophile George Pell. He was unanimously removed from the ticket, and on Tuesday, Austen Hunt and Emma Goldrick stepped down from the ticket for fear of being associated with Baladi. Baladi, Hunt and Goldrick all appeared on the ballot papers nevertheless, as the ballots had already been printed.
The Conservatorium mobilised for Honi and SRC tickets alike, making its influence felt in this election. Both Fit for Honi and Liam for President had Conservatorium student candidates on their tickets. Fit’s Grace Johnson helped propel her ticket over the line by a landslide. Fit received 106 votes at the Conservatorium to Cream’s 26.
A strong correlation emerged throughout the election between Fit for Honi and Donohoe’s campaign, while Cream for Honi seemed to gain support from Jakovac’s voters. The polls at satellite campuses appear to reflect this. At the Conservatorium, 137 votes went to Donohoe while Jakovac received only 10 votes.
There were an extraordinarily high number of informal Honi Soit ballots lodged at all booths, with a current total of 824. This figure is perhaps suggestive of a level of student disengagement with the election of Honi editors, or an inability of these tickets to gain support outside the stupol bubble.
The regulations require the election of the president to be called first, hence the Honi Soit result is not yet official.
Fit’s ticket have all previously contributed to Honi Soit, and also have diverse experience writing and editing for other publications.
Some of their main policies include quick news, quality investigative journalism, more multimedia content and improved comedy.
The 2020 Honi Soit editorial team is comprised of Nina Dillon-Britton, Matthew Forbes, Zhiquan (Murphy) Gan, Rameen Hayat Malik, Grace Johnson, Momoko Metham, Lei Yao (Qianyu Shao), Lara Sonnenschein, Ranuka Tandan, Chuyi Wang and Madeline Ward.
More to come.