Hopefully you have no idea who I am. I was AMS president a brazilian years ago and by an unfortunate circumstance I’m on campus during an AMS election for the first time since 2006. Neal knew this and goaded me into writing a guest post. He suggested I write about something meaningful like a referendum question but I’m happily in the head space where I don’t particularly care.

However, as a former perennial AMS executive candidate, I’m insulted ^[1] by the lacklustre campaigns I’ve seen. Brian Platt ^[2] has noted the absence of campaigns and identified the problem as candidates not submitting election materials.

Why does this matter, you ask? Three reasons:

1. It’s unhealthy for the governance of the AMS to have poorly contested campaigns,
2. It wastes the single best moment of the year for students to learn about the AMS, what it does for them, and what it can do, and
3. It demonstrates that any candidate who says they want better engagement between students and the AMS or students and the university (i.e. all of them) either cares little about doing something or doesn’t have the expertise to do anything.

Even the campaigns that are happening now suck. Awhile ago some nerdlinger decided that good graphic design was the same as good communications and now you get garbage posters like Ben Cappellaci’s ^[3] or Carven Li’s ^[4] that don’t even tell you why they’re qualified to do the job (apologies to both for being the only people with posters that I’ve seen and being on the receiving end of my wrath).

This is not the first time the subject has come up ^[5] on this blog (read both the article and comments from me, some anonymous students, and a former Elections Administrator) and the lack of good, public campaigning is probably the result of the slate ban – some expertise in campaigning was lost, as was always assumed, but as the comments in that post show, the past method of semi-permanent campaigning was obnoxious.

However, it is possible to have good campaigns without annoying students. The University of Alberta Students’ Union has held information workshops a month or so prior to the campaign period to give interested students the information necessary to make an informed run at office, as well as tips about campaigning methods that have worked in the past. At the very least they still publish a booklet called “How to Run, How to Win” ^[6] that’s distributed to candidates. It contains such interesting tidbits as:

• Tips for classroom announcements,
• Ideas for campaign organization,
• Effectiveness of certain poster designs, and
• Information about which faculties turn out to vote and data about typical voters.

Here are some questions that I honestly don’t know the answers to: How many candidates know how to use the SSC to target classrooms for announcements? How many actually do classroom announcements all day, every day? What’s the one trick that’s guaranteed to get you applause? How many dedicated volunteers have your teams recruited? How many do flyering anymore? The web can give lots of great information but you need to entice students to look at your material and that is done best by physically putting yourself in front of them. On the last point, I need to emphasize something: it’s empirically true ^[7].

Some will say they do their outreach on the web and that things like email are perfectly legitimate ways of campaigning. Web campaigns are important, absolutely, but they’re lazy and generally only good at tapping into people that already know you, rather than reaching out beyond your core community.

If a campaign started using the web in a systematized way that actively grabbed any student that came into contact with it, I’d have more tolerance. For instance, kudos to the campaign that uses NationBuilder to build its website next year ^[8] and starts tracking the students that are actually interested in the AMS and reaches out to them directly (for crying out loud it lets you do mass texting on the cheap). As it stands, that’s nobody.

Ignore my advice if you want to or take it – ultimately it doesn’t matter to me – but I’m a person that has a fond attachment to the AMS and isn’t part of the hack circle and through active searching I can still find only scant evidence that an election campaign is happening. That should be self-evidently bad.

Spencer Keys ^[9] was the 96th President of the Alma Mater Society and the first insufferable prat to start saying which number he was. He spent his time afterwards working for provincial and national student associations and working as a consulting lobbyist in Ottawa.