Does anyone remember elementary school elections? Colorful posters would go up in the halls. Candidates would pass out lollipops and gum in class. The winning campaign speech would be filled with promises to extend recess and cut back homework. One year, little Billy ran on the platform that all drinking fountains would henceforth dispense fruit punch instead of boring old water. The student body erupted in applause as visions of a utopian paradise captivated our naïve minds.

It’s obvious that this year’s Associated Students Inc. candidates need to take a page out of little Billy’s strategy guide. Apparently the best way to campaign at Sac State is to fingerpaint your name on a slab of red or yellow plywood and then staple your mug shot to it. Or better yet, draw a picture of yourself to illustrate that not only are you creative, but you think outside the box. Forget substance, forget ideas and forget agendas, because not one of the signs around campus display any.

Most campus dwellers could care less about student government. For most of us, these signs are just an extension of the billboards that are littered along the side of Highway 50, and ASI is nothing more than a month of seeing colored plywood on campus. Our interest is so low, in fact, that the very mention of it in this column may cause you to lose interest and stop reading. And for you, I thank you for your time. Good day.

Now those of you who are still with me, who don’t agree with that fact, take a look at the numbers. According to the university’s Web site, there are nearly 28,000 students enrolled at Sacramento State. In the 2004 ASI election, 2,242 students voted. That’s about 8 percent.

You candidates probably know this, and you probably wonder why the turnout is so pathetically low. I’ll give you some insight into the mind of us 92 percent that didn’t bother to fill out a ballot. We don’t care because the organization you’re running for has done little to affect the daily lives of the average and apathetic student.

What does the normal, commuter student care about? They don’t care about gender specific bathrooms, or athletic contracts, or anything that has to do with dividing the petty budget among two dozen special interest organizations on campus. The focus of ASI’s efforts is concentrated on such a small portion of the university’s population that it seems as though it’s forgotten about the rest of us.

We care that book prices have skyrocketed. We care that parking has become a jumbled cluster of chaos. We care that tuition for current students will soon be raised to pay for some super-arena that won’t be finished until we’re all retired.

In the fray of the upcoming election, current ASI members felt that the best way to represent the student body would be to have a new ASI logo developed. I’d bet that the vast majority of the campus couldn’t tell me what the old logo looked like ?” maybe somewhere around 92 percent. It’s high time that Sac State’s leaders quit patting themselves on the back and start representing the needs of the real students on this campus.

I know that change doesn’t come overnight, and I understand that sometimes getting the ball rolling is the hardest part. It’s the substantial lack of tangible change and progress on issues that affect us that has so many students uninterested in the whole process. In order to get our attention, you’d better understand where we’re coming from because we don’t care how much you know until we know how much you care.

So in light of this depressing reality, my questions to the current office hopefuls remains somewhat selfish: What can you do for me and why do I care?

This is an age of short attention spans and even shorter patience and you need to give me more than a piece of plywood and a picture to spark my interest. Or just give me longer recess, less homework and let the fruit punch flow.