ASUO Election Season Officially Begins
Yes, today marks the beginning of the most wonderful/awful time of the year: ASUO election season. This year there are a record 83 candidates running for various positions in the Associated Students of the University of Oregon, including five candidates for ASUO executive president (along with their respective VP’s).
Three major slates have also formed: the Oregon Action Team, True Blue and Students First. Don’t worry about getting them confused. As per tradition, the slates are color-coded for your convenience; OAT = green, Students First = purple, and True Blue = (take a guess).
With so many candidates and slates, this year’s election is sure to be, at the very least, enormously entertaining. For example, the ODE already ran an article on the spending arms race between the slates. (I wonder how much the True Blue campaign dropped on its fancy-pants website?)
I will be blogging more about the candidates, slates and their platforms. In fact, the Commentator will be extensively covering the elections, so check back here often for updates or follow us on Twitter.
Speaking of which, we are officially starting Grievance Watch 2009. Today’s grievance count is: 0
Am I the most ridiculous?
I actually hope the duck has a grievance filed against him. That would be the most ridiculous grievance filed in ASUO campaign history.
Actually, given the level of ridiculousness of past grievances, it might not be #1. But it would at least make the top 10.
That damn mascot needs to be chucked into the duck pond. Then let the bball players open fire on him.
I’m filing a grievance tomorrow against that damn duck. Let it be named the “Puddles Grievance.” I was sad when Allison Fox kept pacing 13th screaming at administrators because she was unable to come up with any creative campaign ideas. She reminds me of the person who ran Giuliani’s campaign (remember ‘Florida only’)
You guys should do a hot or not rating for the candidates.
CJ-
Your Banana Car project looks like it could be the future of green energy for this country. Thank you for being an example that radical environmental liberalism has a place in everyone’s heart, next to fatty lipid deposits.
God Bless SEIU
Johnny
@CJ Ciaramella:
By all means, hate on.
Bryan wrote: “The haters are going to hate no matter what. Just ignore them and move on.”
Hey, we do what we can.
But really, even my website is W3C certified.
@Kai Davis
The haters are going to hate no matter what. Just ignore them and move on.
Let’s see if it passes the test for hacking and general /b/-tardship.
If it doesn’t, then True Blue is down for the count. And I’ll be laughing my ass off.
Michael,
Thanks for pointing out the accessibility issues. I’ve added that to my todo list and if we have time I’ll make sure the site validates xhtml strict and demonstrates accessibility and inclusiveness for all viewers.
Whatever roles the participants took in building the website, no one was left feeling exploited and no CS majors were suckered into building it. The Design / PR team built the site as a team and we gave it one hell of go. We’re proud of what we created and we’re proud of True Blue. Thanks for looking at our site. Best wishes.
Love,
Kai
Bah, those apostrophes like to sneak in after midnight (and I can’t even edit my comments anymore)!
(I guess it’s my turn and I should keep playing the game I started.)
Okay, so what we really have is: The CS major did all the hard work of making the site run. The environmental science major complained about wasted electrons the entire time. The two economics majors temporarily became web designers and bitterly argued about the effect each proposed design had on the global economy. The final design was chosen because it will help the world out of the global recession.
I took the liberty of running your site through it’s paces. Not all of the content is easily accessible to deaf, blind, and other differently-abled users (as indicated by the TAW3) test. That is not very inclusive. It also fails to validate as XHTML 1.0 strict as indicated by the doctype on the main page with 64 errors being indicated by the W3C validator.
Thank you for amusing me briefly.
Hey Michael,
I’m one of the Design and PR volunteers for the True Blue campaign. We actually designed the entire site in house. No suckering of computer science majors at all. The Design team consisted of three members of the slate – Jeremy Blanchard, Curtis Haley, and Zach Stark-MacMillan – and Kai Davis, some guy who thinks that True Blue can actually carry through on what it is promising.
As a team, we put a lot of time and energy into the site, but it (and the facebook app) is a product we conceived of and built ourselves. It means a lot to me – to us – that you’d think a ‘bunch of cs students’ designed the site. In reality it was two economics majors, one environmental science major, and our single computer science major andwe produced what we think is the best ASUO campaign site to date. We learned a lot and hope once the campaign is finished – win or lose – to share this knowledge with future ASUO campaigns through an open wiki.
If you have any questions about the technical side of the slate, please feel free to contact me at [email protected]; I’m serving as the contact person for all questions addressed to the design and public relations teams.
Have a great week!
Love,
Kai
The web site probably didn’t cost much, as they suckered a bunch of computer science students into creating it for them, with the likely payment being “experience” or maybe even “you can do the ASUO page if we win.”
I’m on a political sabatical.
Wow…what a load of…
The elections, not the ASUO watch.
Like I said on my recent ASUO Watch post, if I was Nick Schultz, I would have ran in the year 1,000,000 so I’d have a higher spending limit.
@Bryan: That’s slighly lower than the ASUO limit of a 7% increase!
That means that TrueBlue gets a 0.000497512% increase next year if they decide to make themselves a true political party.
TrueBlue is limiting its spending to $2,009, so it must have spent $1,776 on its website, to continue with the year=money theme.
Also, its fontface and color scheme are vaguely familiar.
Bryan Saxton and I have also started an ASUO Watch, asuowatch.blogspot.com.
Is Thunderlove running again?
I’d like to file a grievance against your face. With my fist.