On Oct. 23, the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU) released the results of the online ratification for its fall General Assembly (GA). The online vote ratified two motions—one to rename SSMU’s Breakout Room, the other to build a rock climbing wall in the SSMU building. Compared to the disappointing voter turnout for the GA itself, which failed to maintain a quorum of 100 students, nearly 3,000 people voted in the online ratification, surpassing the required quorum of 10 per cent of the student body. By requiring approval from a much larger percentage of the student body, the online vote acts as a check on a forum potentially dominated by a small, impassioned group of students well-versed on a specific issue. The online vote has acheived this by making the vote easier and more accessible to students unable or unwilling to attend the Assembly. 

At the same time, more could be done to make this form of participation more relevant and visible. While quorum was exceeded by three per cent, a remaining 87 per cent of students still did not participate in the online vote. The Tribune’s editorial board was split on the following question: does responsibility for ensuring greater participation rest on SSMU, or with the student body itself?

Point: Better participation must come from students

The online vote’s success proves that the GA reforms of President Josh Redel and the SSMU executive have come to fruition. Certainly there are always improvements to be made, but the fact is more than 13 per cent of undergraduate students voted online this year. In previous years, voting was limited to live participants at the GA. SSMU frequently struggles to attract even one per cent of the student body to attend in person for the whole evening.

The ratification’s success also shows that students respond to improvements in the voting process. Anyone who voted online knows that it took less than three minutes, and was easily accessible through the new SSMU GA website, which has information on the motions and legislative process.

The question is how much easier students need voting to be. SSMU, it seems, has done its part in encouraging those it represents to vote. While there could always be more publicity, more outreach, and more communication, the onus now lies with students to share their opinion, if they have one.

The truth is that most students do not have strong opinions about changing the name of the SSMU Breakout Room. And while a rock-climbing wall would certainly be an exciting addition, the issue is not likely to attract the attention of over 21,000 students. Perhaps this points to a problem in the kinds of motions presented at the SSMU GA, but as it stands, the GA merely reflects the initiatives of those willing enough to submit a motion.

Essentially, SSMU is the voice of the student body. It should not be their job to make students have a voice; their job is to make it easier for students to share their voice. Considering that students can now vote online, watch livestreams of the GA, express concerns to the GA “mood watcher,” learn about motions on the website, and do all of these things from their smart phones, it’s now time for students to participate in the dialogue. They have no reason not to.

Counterpoint: SSMU has more to do

While a seamless ratification is certainly a success for SSMU’s reforms to the GA, it is not enough. The online vote is a necessary but insufficient step in the right direction. Voter turnout of 13 per cent is an improvement, but it is not an accomplishment. The onus remains on SSMU to make these motions more visible and relevant to students.

This begins and ends with SSMU demonstrating motions’ relevance to students. Beyond a series of emails, the small percentage that voted did so without any other prompting by SSMU: there were no posters calling for participation, elucidating that a rock-climbing wall was at stake. The key to increasing student involvement is not only to clarify how a motion is submitted—which the SSMU’s website does—but to transcend each motion’s “whereas” clause to communicate to students what is really at stake.

A broader discussion needs to take place about why students should care about their student government. This discussion needs to come from SSMU, and not only because this is appropriate and within its purview as a group elected and funded by students. SSMU is the only group that is in the position to have this discussion; out of all of the groups on campus, SSMU has the funds, the reach, and the mandate to engage and represent all students.

In order to attract the remaining 87 per cent of the student body, SSMU’s first goal should be to facilitate participation from all groups on campus. This includes a more active role from the rest of the SSMU councillors, in particular faculty representatives, in directly engaging their own constituents in the voting process. It also includes fostering a culture of participation among first years—reaching out to residences and holding student government workshops, or allowing students to vote before grabbing dinner by setting up a station in residence lobbies.

It will always be incumbent upon student government to demonstrate why students ought to engage in student politics. SSMU built the GA, and SSMU uses the GA as one of its ways to pass motions. The student society derives legitimacy from the active and direct engagement of its constituents in such a forum. As such, it is SSMU’s job to continue to work towards a solution to the GA problem. We can complain about the lack of student engagement until we’re blue in the face, but that will change nothing—particularly as students most likely will not be listening.

A hacking group calling itself Team Ghostshell recently unveiled “ProjectWestWind,” a leak of 120,000 files taken from the servers of post-secondary schools globally. The list of 100 institutions whose servers were compromised included the University of British Columbia and McMaster University. The group posted the leaked files alongside a statement encouraging a discussion of the direction in which higher education is headed.

This sort of ‘hacktivist’ action has grown popular in recent years, following the example of high-profile groups such as Anonymous and WikiLeaks. These groups work outside the scope of the law, which is generally vague in this realm due to lack of legal precedent. They justify their actions on a moral basis, but there is always an element of risk when working on the fringes of legality.

As a result, many of these organizations—Team Ghostshell included—work under a veil of anonymity. Most notably, Anonymous has succeeded in garnering considerable attention in the mainstream media. Working in anonymity allows such a group to execute and advertise its projects on a large scale without having to fear for their own personal security. These projects are not lucrative, and those who take them on have lives outside hacking—day jobs, families, and friends. Obscuring their identities allows them to avoid compromising these other components of their lives.

Other organizations have chosen to put forward a public figure to represent the group—the most notable example being WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Throughout the height of his organization’s release of leaked diplomatic cables, classified videos and correspondences, Assange was immensely visible in the media. He made appearances on talk shows and presented a human face for the world to associate with WikiLeaks. The risks of this approach are evident, as Assange is currently trapped in Ecuador’s embassy in London, which has granted him diplomatic asylum while he sorts out his legal struggles.

Despite the risks, there are some undeniable advantages to Assange’s method. Many of these groups claim to seek increases in government accountability and transparency—a bit of a contradictory stance for organizations that are shrouded in secrecy. Julian Assange gave WikiLeaks a sense of legitimacy that demystified it, and his voice advocated the organization’s cause to the public. By contrast, Anonymous’ press releases and announcements are delivered in a robotic, ominous voice, one that would not be out of place in a dystopian science fiction movie. This inaccessible delivery of their message precludes them from much of the media attention they might receive otherwise.

A further issue with operating in secret is the communicational disconnect in an organization without specific hierarchical structure. In many of these organizations, members may be anonymous even to one another. In such an environment, all those involved certainly share a common ideological standpoint, but risk failing to advance the discourse beyond ideology. Team Ghostshell’s recent large-scale hack was a chance for it to spark discussion and have its ideas heard, but rather than a pointed critique, it offered a generic, disjointed message which only spoke of change in the broadest terms.

When a hacking group circumvents the law on ideological grounds, it needs to cover said grounds as incisively and effectively as possible. Failure to do so brings into question the validity of the organization, and takes out of the question any notion of its place as some sort of purveyor of vigilante justice. As with any other company or organization, if it is unable to carry out its purpose, a restructuring or changing of priorities is in order.

In many cases, the condition of anonymity is an impediment both to a group’s ability to construct a coherent message, and to the public’s reception of this message. While not every group will have a member willing to throw himself or herself into the spotlight in the way that Assange did, there are certainly steps to be taken to soften the image of the shadowy, anonymous organization.  It begins with specifying how change needs to happen.

In a world where online presence and social media have made self-marketing easier than ever before, it is not unrealistic to expect these groups to follow through on their projects with a clear, coherent statement regarding what they are seeking to prove. If nobody understands their message, then what’s the point?

As the presidential election campaign in the United States reaches the home stretch, one thing has become abundantly clear—barring any truly egregious mistakes by either campaign, this election is going to be particularly close. Thanks to the quirks of the Electoral College, the results in what are popularly known as ‘swing states’ are acutely important. However, the voters that are still in play in most of these states, ‘undecided voters,’ are, by many accounts, generally under-informed about the campaign. Typically, they consider themselves too busy to actually keep up with the issues, but still vote out of a sense of civic duty.

The first question this prompts is: how are these voters deciding? According to a trove of political science research, voters with ‘low information’ on the candidates, policy proposals, or the campaign itself, often use heuristics—mental shortcuts—to narrow down their choices. Much of this academic research has focused on what these heuristics are. In general, they include partisan party identification, visible physical characteristics, such as gender and race, candidate job occupations, and most disturbingly, ballot positioning.  Past research has found that the order of candidates’ names on the ballot can influence voters’ decisions.

Political campaigns have come to believe that ‘low information’ voters can be swayed by even more trivial cues. In the tightly contested 2008 Obama-Clinton Democratic campaign, strategists put a concerted effort into getting candidates onto ‘soft’ entertainment and lifestyle television programs, based on the belief that a decisive group of voters would be swayed by their haircut and clothing preferences, among other things.

So what can be done? Many of the historical ‘checks’ on American democracy were crafted with the express purpose of preventing the rule by an uninformed mass. Some have argued that a renewed fear of uninformed voters is simply a new manifestation of this old elitist loathing for the common man. However, the point of democracy, especially as opposed to a more totalitarian form of government, is not simply that citizens will vote in elections. Rather, the point is that a representative mass of the population, armed with proper information on policies, would reach generally better decisions than an autocratic dictatorship.

So what is to be done? The inevitable first response is to improve civic education at the primary level, but education can wear off as people age. The more immediate solution, at least in the case of the United States, would actually be to eliminate the Electoral College and replace it with a raw popular vote-based system. This would bring the entire country into play, instead of a select few states with particularly fickle populaces, and solve or at least ameliorate the problem of ‘low information’ voters in two ways. First, candidates would have to talk to a larger cross section of the country, rather than ignoring states with clear party leanings. This would revive voter engagement by making their votes matter more substantively. Second, the area in play during the election would be extended from a group of about seven states, thereby reducing the influence of easily persuadable ‘low information’ voters in ‘swing states’ to begin with.

The optimal solution to this whole problem of the ‘low information’ voter is not to keep them from participating in elections, as the harm of such efforts would far outweigh any benefit gained. Rather, we should give them the information to participate more gainfully, or to reduce their influence to the point that they aren’t the decisive demographic in our elections.