When ASUO President Dotters-Katz kicked the OSA campus coordinator off campus, you could almost hear the heads exploding at OSA headquarters. Now, like any good lobbying group that has been called out as unnecessary, the OSA is in full-on self-justification mode. And it begins with a story in the Daily Emerald, in which we are introduced to a troubling side effect of Dotters-Katz’ rash move: without OSA there will be no voter registration at the UO. Well, according to the student body president of PSU, anyway.  “I let him know how hard it’s been to not have (a campus organizer) for the last couple of months,” ASPSU President Hannah Fisher confides to the ‘Ol Dirty. “If U of O fails then we all fail,” says Fisher of the OSA’s statewide voter reg effort. “If it’s not broken you don’t fix it.”

But Dotters-Katz doesn’t seem too concerned about the dire warnings from Portland. In fact, his executive has publicly committed to registering 10,000 students at the U of O. Dotters-Katz tells the ODE: “there’s going to be a huge presence on campus, and we expect that we will met our goal due to the effective planning of my team and the work of a huge corps of volunteers.” From classrooms to club sports to the Athletic Department, Dotters-Katz plan seems to have left nowhere to hide from hordes of voter registrators. And yes, he does somehow expect to do this with help only from Building Votes, a Bus Project-affiliated initiative.

And what of the criticism from Fisher that “not having a vote organizer on campus is going to make it a lot harder to meet his voter registration goal?” Well, if we look back to the last election year, we can see that the OSA (via then-Legislative Affairs Honcho Emily McLain) registered “only” 6,876 students. Now that’s quite an accomplishment, but it also means that if Dotters-Katz only achieves half of his goal he’ll still nearly match the OSA’s last election year result. And he’ll have saved students $30k, or over one dollar per student per year in the process. So when you inevitably get hassled to register to vote this fall, please just do so. It’s an easy way to reward leadership that takes on challenges to save students money, instead of outsourcing a simple job to a cynical lobbying group.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 17th, 2008 at 16:21 by Niedermeyer and is filed under '08 Election, ASUO, Blowing Stuff Up, Elections, Ol' Dirty Emerald, Oregon, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.