AMS elections: let the saturation begin

For Queen's grads and those not familiar with the Queen's student government, the Alma Mater Society's (AMS) elections are under way, with our student centre the JDUC completely blanketed with campaigning and bad music to go with it.

This year is certainly different from the past in that there are six teams (the President and two VP positions are vied for together, for those who don't know) running and a new voting system: preferential balloting. This is one type of proportional representation, in which the teams are ranked such that the votes are counted and recounted until one team receives more than 50% of total votes cast, after candidates are eliminated and votes shifted to each voter's next preferred choice (go to HERE for a more complete explanation).

This was installed after last election's debacle of disqualifying a team and its votes and thereby disenfranchising a bloc of the voting student population. Granted, student elections are nothing like the real thing, since a lot of the votes are cast based on pure popularity rather than policy. While I'd rather see some form of Proportional Representation in the actual levels of government, this will be good because it'll give me some idea of PR at work in Canada and how well it works out on a small scale.

This election will also be interesting because there are supposedly two 'joke teams' running, one of whom (Team BMP, aka. Khaki Snack) have a blog HERE. As I said before, some votes are based on popularity. I guess I'm just wondering, what if Khaki Snack wins? Or would they sabotage their own campaign in order for them not to have to actually deal with student politics and go back to playing fun music?

Since I can't vote as a grad student and the grad society here's not all that influential/important anyways, I'm going to enjoy watching this election consume the campus. I just hope student turnout will be as high if not higher than previous years (~30% of the total student population)...