So it begins: with smiles and branded t-shirts, hacks of all varieties will be approaching you over the coming week-and-a-bit because it seems as if — amidst assignments and revues — SRC elections have begun in earnest once again.
Of course, this time it’s going to be different, with regulation changes from earlier this year kicking in. As reported in Honi earlier this year, instead of a gruelling campaign season coming in shy of a month, you’ll only have to endure campaigners for a little over a week. In addition, unlike previous years, 2017 will see all polling booths cease voting at the same time. Although in-person campaigning must still be in English, printed materials have been opened up to multilingual content (which nonetheless requires a third-party translator and translations approved by the RO).
There’s also less money available to tickets this year, which could potentially make campaigns smaller in scale than in years previous. Plus, all of this will be over very shortly — pre-polling will take place on Tuesday 19, followed by two days of actual polling on Wednesday 20 and Thursday 21 September.
As you wander down Eastern Avenue, however, you’ll perhaps be struck, not by the multicoloured masses, but rather, the absence of them. It’s not for lack of trying. Eastern Avenue, with its bollards coincidentally installed prior to this second-semester bout of stupol, looks even more an obstacle course with the addition of A-frames. And although your faithful reporter did spy hacks behind campaign tables alone and palely loitering, that was about it.
Despite its reputation as the artery of student politics, Eastern Avenue was… dead, at least on the first morning of in-person campaigning. We expect things will pick up as polling draws closer — or at least, we hope it does, otherwise what will we write about?
