Did you go out and vote in the Associated Students Inc. elections last week? Of course you didn’t. It didn’t matter that there were signs posted all over campus, debates were held and The State Hornet even took the time to interview and endorse candidates – the voter turnout somehow managed to be lower than last year.

Six, that’s right, six percent of the Sacramento State student population took the time to vote for the candidates who would represent them for the upcoming year. A total of 1,616 students voted. That total was 73 students less than last year’s total.

How could this have happened? Maybe it was because there was only one candidate, Miguel Cervantes, who was running for president of ASI. Maybe it was because several other positions such as director of Arts and Letters, director of Engineering and Computer Sciences and director of Undeclared did not have any candidates petition to run.

The simplest and most logical explanation is usually the right one. In this case, the explanation is that students either don’t know, don’t care or aren’t the least bit interested in anything ASI does. Most students on campus probably can’t tell you what ASI stands for, much less about any of the programs it sponsors.

The buzzword that was used all too frequently by ASI representatives last year was “visibility.” The students’ visibility of ASI was the major concern. They were convinced that there could be no scenario in which the voter turnout would go any lower than seven percent, but it did. It could be that students are too busy to vote, which seems unlikely because there were booths set up outside of the University Union for two days last week. Most likely, students are not impressed with the work ASI has done for them in the past and feel neither loyalty to any of the candidates nor affiliation with any party. No one is expecting students to have any loyalty to any of the slates, platforms or parties, or whatever they want to be called, because the names and ideas change every election.

Of course, this diagnosis of students’ assessment of ASI would be incomplete if we didn’t rehash the concept that this is a commuter campus and students don’t feel any connection to Sac State. This is just a place to get a degree for many who attend, so getting them to have interest in campus politics is next to impossible.

So what is ASI to do? There is really nothing that ASI can do to reach the students. As long as Sac State is viewed as just another commuter campus, it will be nearly impossible to get students excited about voting in an ASI election. ASI needs to work on finding students to fill the vacant positions, and then it can worry about drawing more students to the polls.

Ideally, next year’s election will not see a lower turnout. There is really nowhere to go but up. However, some of us at The Hornet were idealistic enough to think that was the case with this most recent election. Obviously, we were embarassingly wrong.

The elections are important to the future of this campus, despite what voter turnout may suggest. These candidates come from different upbringings, educations and cultural backgrounds, and they are the only voice for the diverse campus population here at Sac State.

No one expects ASI to lead the charge to repeal the proposed budget cuts to the CSU system. No one expects ASI to make this campus into a destination campus. Maybe that is the problem. No one expects anything from ASI.

The State Hornet Staff can be reached at [email protected]