Ten votes.
Last year, that's all it took.
As one of the lead reporters covering the 2006 Student Association elections, finding out that the next president and vice president were elected by only a handful of students took me by surprise.
And I wasn't alone.
After the announcement that Viqar Hussain and Leslie Meister's 1,017 votes beat out Greg Stern and Marquis Whitmore's 1,007 votes, emotions erupted outside the SA office on the third floor of the Student Union. And it wasn't even a clean sweep. Although the Advocates took the top two spots and most of the delegate positions, rivals Progress snagged the treasurer's chair and one SUNY seat.
Hussain came exceptionally close to shedding tears of joy. After a short speech, Stern proclaimed that it was time to start drinking.
I tried to figure out how I was about to write one of the biggest news stories of the year.
When covering stories like these - elections, contests, anything that's going to have last-minute results on deadline - reporters will write out pre-election notes ahead of time into a shell. Basically, it's a shell that can be filled in with the rest of the numbers and facts as soon as they're available, saving on writing time as deadline draws near.
Sometimes writers will even write two stories, one for each way the election could go. Think of the famous picture of President-elect Truman holding up the headline "Dewey defeats Truman" in 1948 - the typesetters at the Chicago Daily Tribune jumped the gun.
Like the generations of journalists covering elections before me, I had a framework ready to go on Election Night 2006. It was written for an average ending; Candidate A beats Candidate B, so on and so forth. At about 9 p.m., after getting the numbers and witnessing the aftermath, I sat down to write.
After quickly realizing that last year's race was anything but ordinary, my shell was basically useless. The news wasn't just the winners and the losers anymore; it was how a slim-majority, split decision government was going to work. Or at least, how UB's newest student officials were going to try.
The story and all of the fallout from the night consumed the paper's front page the next day, and letters to the editor poured in, filling the opinion pages. How much a small part of the student body cared about the process was impressive.
Unfortunately, it was just that: a small part. In all, 2,347 undergraduates made it to the polls. And some of them only voted for some offices and not others. That's out of over 18,000 of us at UB.
And 10 of those 2,347 impacted the future of their university more than they probably thought they ever could.
Preaching about how every vote matters can get old pretty fast, but last year renewed my faith. There is no electoral college for SA, and the odds of voting booth malfunction are pretty much nonexistent.
Last year, voting mattered. This year, I think it will too.
On Monday, we at The Spectrum are going to present our endorsements for the 2007 SA Elections. Between now and then, we're doing our homework - reading platforms, conducting interviews, balancing pros and cons - to figure out who we think the best men and women to lead us next year are.
As an editorial board, we hope our input is helpful; but don't just take our word for it. Between now and next week, get to know your candidates. Head up to SA's offices and ask around. Find out the answers to the questions you have, just in case we don't ask them. Or let us know what you want to know now so we can all work together.
Polls open on Tuesday.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
