First, the good news: More people voted in this year’s Student Government elections than ever before. The number of students who voted is up a whopping 50.2 percent from two years ago, including a (slight) increase this year.
A total of 4,610 students voted, which is no mean feat. In an election hampered by snow days, which limited the candidates’ ability to campaign, such a result is unprecedented by USC’s standards. It shows that the surge in voters last year wasn’t a fluke, but a part of a larger trend.
But in an election of more than 23,000 undergraduate students, about 19,000 (over 80 percent) chose not to, even though voting is done online. That paints a very different picture: a campus that simply doesn’t care.
What’s the problem? Not the Elections Commission, surely. You can’t go three feet on campus without running into signs urging students to “Gamecock the Vote.”
They’ve done their job.
No, the main issue here is simple student apathy. A large section of the student body simply does not care what SG does, or doesn’t see how SG affects their lives.
Whatever the underlying problem, the solution here is to increase SG’s visibility to the student body. If SG programs can meaningfully affect a greater part of the student body, more people will seek to make thoughtful choices when the next election season comes around. That’s a thought SG’s newly elected officials should keep in mind as they prepare to take office.
We’re not trying to harp on this any more than we feel we have to. In the context of the past few elections, this time around has been pretty good. (Additionally, in a country where about 40 percent of the population doesn’t vote for its president, we can only ask so much.)
But there’s plenty of room to improve, and we’re hopeful that this growth will continue far into the future.