96 percent of students didn’t vote in ASM
Voting figures from the recent All Student Meeting (ASM) show that only 895 out of 22,944 students voted on the motions which were discussed on Monday 13 May, which means that 96 percent of students did not vote.
Voting was open between Tuesday 14 May and Friday 17 May. The previous ASM has a turnout of 4.8%.
If the motions were voted on under the old referenda voting system, which had a quorum of 7.5 percent of the student population, none of the motions would have been carried.
There has been a big increase in the number of abstentions, which represented 22 percent of all votes cast across the 11 motions voted on. This figure was up from the previous ASM which saw 17 percent of votes cast as abstentions.
Warwick Students’ Union (SU) democracy and development officer, Cosmo March, told the Boar that he didn’t think turnout was that low: “I personally don’t consider this turnout as low considering the absence of contentious issues in the agenda […] and the fact that it is bang in the middle of exam season.”
When asked about the rise in abstentions he said: “I do not consider abstentions to necessarily be a bad thing, particularly in the case of the motion concerning Postgraduates – it demonstrates that students are choosing to abstain rather than vote blindly on issues that don’t affect them or they haven’t researched.”
The motion which received the largest mandate was the ‘Passive Smoking’ policy, with specific mention of smoking on the ‘Library bridge’, which mandated the Sabbatical officers who sit on the University’s ‘Health and Safety board’ to lobby the University to better enforce its smoking policy.
Whilst 72 percent of those who voted, voted for the motion, that figure still represents fewer than 2.5 percent of the total student population.
All the motions were carried except the policy on ‘Women’s Representation’ which resolved to enact a 50 percent quota on the SU’s NUS delegation. 56 percent of students, who voted, voted against the motion. The motion proved the most contentious at Monday’s discussion.
Asked specifically about the ‘Women’s Representation’ motion, Cosmo March replied: “There could be several different reasons as to why this motion did not pass, but put simply it could just be that Warwick students do not feel this is a progressive way to tackle the issue of gender inequality.”
The motion that which was carried by the slimmest margin was the boycott of ATOS, which was carried by just 42 votes, or 0.2 percent of the student population. ATOS have been accused of causing the deaths of disabled people who have assessed as being fit for work and gone on to die whilst working, and caused controversy when they set up a graduate recruitment stall in the SU during Disability Awareness Week.
The previous ASM saw the Union’s boycotts of Nestlé, BAE systems, oil companies and Bacardi lifted, with only the ban on Arms Companies remaining in place.
The motion which saw the highest number of abstentions was the amendment of the ‘Postgraduate Sessional Tutor’ policy, which mandates members of the Sabbatical team to develop a campaign to encourage trade union membership of postgraduate sessional tutors who are students.
41 percent of students abstained from voting in this policy, more than the 39 percent who voted for the policy. This was also the policy which was carried by the smallest number of students voting, with only 273 voting for, or 1.2 percent of the entire student population.
Alex Dinsdale, a first-year History student, said he didn’t vote in the ASM : “I didn’t vote, probably due to a lack of advertisement and my lack of faith in student politics, to be honest.”
Comments (8)
Another thing the SU they don’t do, and really should because it’s extremely effective, is lecture shoutouts. The SU ONLY EVER do this around election time, which is just narcissistic really. Shoutouts are extremely effective, and memorable.
Personally, I didn’t vote because I couldn’t imagine it making any difference to anything, But I did leave an antagonistic comment on the Women’s representation motion, which I was very much *for*. The fact that it then didn’t pass suggests that the minority who do vote, don’t give it a great deal of thought.
Also – I feel obliged to add this -I was pretty concerned about the ‘smaller module’ policy. There’s been some pressure in the life science department to actually increase CATS per module (first and second year 7.5 CAT modules have been mixed and matched to create larger 15 CAT modules) partly to reduce the number of exams, and partly to encourage cross-referencing and integration of concepts.
The arguments for smaller modules seemed pretty dubious to me.
Anyway. I agree with Helena. Lecture shoutouts would be an easy way to remind people. Students are bombarded with twitter/facebook/posters constantly, there’s no real alternative to human-human.
George – research companies can estimate with good predictive power because their sample is randomised. Warwick however is a microcommunity with a politically loud minority. Not really comparable.
I think that the smaller module motion was more for arts students and wouldn’t affect courses that already have 15 cat or even 7.5 (unimaginable to me!) modules. In the Lit department pretty much every single module is 30 cats and therefore run across both terms. In one year we do four modules. I think it’s just a question of widening our choice so we could take some 15 cat modules over one term and maybe get to do six modules instead of 4?
Ah, for some reason I got the impression that these small modules would be less than 7.5 CATs. Which would obviously be awful. THe whole poit of having CATS is that it’s a kind of universal currency between universities so that you can transfer your credit if you want to study somewhere else, and this works really well even internationally (europe uses ECTs, 1 ECT = 2 CATs) the US system is slightly more confusing though, because the number of credit points you need to transfer on to the next year is different at different universities (But usually it’s 30 points per year, so divide your points by 4 for US credit)
So that was completely tangential. Widening your choices is always a good thing. New ideas often come from the area between seemingly unrelated topics.
Is 900 responses really poor enough to warrant this headline when you consider that many research companies will be able to give an estimate of the voting intention of the entire population of the UK with a high level of confidence, using a similar number of respondents?
I completely agree with the lack of advertising statement – I was aware of the ASM only because I knew some of those reporting on it. When I went to vote on the SU website on the Tuesday, I couldn’t even see a link on the front page. If there was one there, it wasn’t prominent. This meant that you didn’t just have to go onto the SU site to vote, you had to be aware of the ASM and click on the ‘democracy’ tab. For a student populace that’s generally indifferent to student politics, more needs to be done to get us engaged.
Really? It was featured prominently all week on the scrolling news banner of the homepage, as well as being advertised repeatedly on Facebook and Twitter…
There’s two reasons why the old referenda style meant better democracy:
1) There was a full formed debate where arguments for and against were presented alongside the voting buttons, so people could hear a distilled set of arguments, rather than watch long videos or make a gut decision
2) Because there was actual campaigning on the during the week, it was less avoidable. Like the elections, people couldn’t really escape the fact it was going on.
Now, because of company law we HAD to make AGMs the big deal. Which is annoying. However, I think that we perhaps should think about reviving some part of the referenda structure, particularly publishing written arguments for/against at the point of voting, and also doing a bit more ‘get out the vote’ activities as we do with the elections (for the people who don’t spend much time watching the SU website, the facebook groups, the posters, the wall planners, their emails…)