Election results for the Griffith delegation for the National Union of Students are in, with four Stand Up and two Pulse candidates elected.

This year is the third in which Gryffithdor lead candidate Aaron Payne led an NUS ticket, but the first in which he did not win a delegate position. Last year Pulse won three positions, and Go! (members of which are now part of the Stand Up ticket) won two.

Participation in NUS elections is on the increase – 631 votes were cast in this election, up from 551 last year and 358 in 2011. This year voter turnout consisted of approximately 7-8% of the student population.

Playing hard ball

Campaigners from all three tickets directly competed for the attention of students in Campus Heart and the Undercroft at Nathan campus last Wednesday.

Each time a campaigner caught the interest of a passing student, rival campaigners rushed to pitch their ticket. Frequently students were surrounded by campaigners, all talking over the top of each other attempting to have the last word.

Stand Up campaigner Tiffany Weber expressed concern when as many as five campaigners from all tickets converged on one student to the point where she was pinned against the Goanna Lounge wall. Tiffany asked everyone to take a step back and give the student some space.

Stand Up campaigner Kat Henderson told A Carrot Affair that she overheard conversations between Pulse and Gryffithdor campaigners about how they can work together to stop Stand Up from succeeding in the election.

Later, Kat allegedly attempted to burn Pulse campaigner Jonathan Nkunzimana with a cigarette during campaigning on Wednesday afternoon. A report was filed with Returning Officer Colin Miflin.

Mr Milfin said that he is following up on a report from defendant Kat Henderson. The next step will then be to weigh up the ‘balance of probability’ before deciding on a course of action. He said it is difficult to determine what happened when the only witnesses are from the competing tickets, who maintain solidarity with their respective team members involved in the issue.

Kat Henderson is not an enrolled student at Griffith. Non-students are not allowed to campaign in student elections. This is enforced by a requirement for all campaigners to wear a lanyard carrying their student ID card when participating in election activities. Kat does have a student card – she reportedly enrolled in a Griffith course which she dropped after receiving her student ID.

Dodgy tactics?

Nine tickets nominated in last week’s elections to fill six individual delegate positions representing Griffith at the National Union of Students.

Three tickets were full (consisting of six nominees): Pulse, Gryffithdor, and Stand Up.

Six partial tickets (fewer than six candidates in each, with most or all consisting of two) nominated:

Salaam for NUS

Free Parking

Marriage Equality

We Hate Tony Abbott

No Cuts to Higher Education

College Students

We Hate Tony Abbott was originally to be named Fark Tony Abbott however before being permitted to register they were asked to rename themselves to something that did not sound like ‘fuck.’

All six partial tickets were registered by Owen Cosgriff, who is also involved with the major ticket Stand Up. The ticket preferences all flowed to Stand Up.

This not only raised the question of whether it is fair to set up tickets purely to harvest votes through preferences, but also suspicions that the front tickets were an attempt to block other tickets from using their preferred colours for campaigning.

NUS election rules state that no ticket can use a colour or colour combination in their promotional materials already registered under another ticket.

Returning Officer Colin Miflin said that colours must be significantly different so that slight printing errors or shade variation do not make different tickets’ colours indistinguishable. For example, pink and red are considered separate colours but lilac and lavender are not. Different combinations of colours are also permissible, e.g. red and blue, blue and yellow.

The Friday before election week, Gryffithdor campaign coordinators Aaron Payne and Isaac Ryan registered their ticket, which they had originally planned to make red, under maroon instead. Their biggest concern was proving that maroon was a different colour to red.

Who cares?

Most students are not involved in student politics, and most are not even aware the National Union of Students exists let alone what its roles, responsibilities and capabilities are.

Each ticket had policies that suggested significantly different ideas of what the NUS is and what it can achieve. Can students make an informed vote when it is so easy to be misled by campaign rhetoric?