Last week, DU students cast their votes for their Undergraduate Student Government (USG) representatives. Normally, campaigning only lasts four days for both senatorial and presidential candidates. Four days is not very much time to get your message across to the most people, so the campaigning period should be extended by a day.
This year’s election was extended to eight days due to crippling technological difficulties with getting ballots to each person. For whatever reason, it took over 24 hours to get emails with the links to vote to many students. Having been a candidate myself, I know that the technological problems were frustrating, but also that eight days was too long to have to balance school work with campaigning. But I don’t think extending the campaign by one day would be too burdensome.

The typical USG campaign lasts from Monday until Thursday afternoon. Four days of schmoozing and trying to reach as many people as possible is probably enough time to run a pretty successful campaign. I also understand why the campaign last from Monday through Thursday. This is when most people will be on campus because of classes and thus easier to reach.

But why not just make it a campaigning week? Adding in Friday would allow for last minute campaigning while not being overbearing. Voting could begin Friday morning and end Friday night so that campaigning doesn’t have to spill over into the weekend.

In general, people get tired very quickly of political campaigns. The students here are no different. They want to be able to enjoy their meals in peace without having people come up to their tables to deliver their platforms. They want to be able to walk around campus without seeing “Vote for” chalking all over the place. And I’m sure they are tired of all the flyers and papers that are posted on walls and handed out.

But the students also know that this is just all part of the process. Asking them to deal with campaigning for one more day isn’t too excruciating of a thing to ask.

Everything that I have said thus far has primarily been regarding senatorial elections, where each senator position only has a fraction of the total student body as constituents. For presidential elections, that extra day could be a great help. Again, this year was slightly different because there was only one ticket running for president and vice president. Normally, there would be at least two tickets if not more. The president needs to appeal to the entire student body and has to do that it the same amount of time as a departmental or major senator. Every presidential candidate would appreciate an extra day to spread their message.

In fact, an extra day may not be enough time for presidential candidates. Perhaps we should extend senatorial campaigns by one day, but extend presidential campaigns by a week. It is completely unfair to ask presidential candidate to reach, at minimum, four times as many people in the same amount of time as the senatorial candidates.
Either way, the USG campaign need to be extended. We need to give our candidates enough time to get their messages across so that students have enough time to really think about each platform.

Note, though, that extending the campaign because of technical difficulties does not count as reform. USG needs to change its rules regarding the election in order for the campaign to become meaningful. This is an issue that I hope the newly elected senators will to address next year.