Important Notice: Due to limitations imposed upon Off the Press by the Stute that may or may not be the direct result of our trying to break the story of the SGA’s brief flirt with totalitarianism last semester, the kind, lovable, and attractive journalists at Off the Press are no longer allowed to post the actual names of any student within our news articles, even if they are a public figure currently occupying the highest office in the land. This will make our article, which is about an election containing only one choice of candidates, extremely difficult and unnecessarily complicated as we are forced to dance around the names of the two most powerful students currently alive today. Notice Over.
Break out the mini flags and straw hats, because it was election time once again for the SGA last week. Everyone remembers the extreme levels of political shenaniganery that was last semester’s presidential election, namely that there wasn’t one and the SGA simply willed the next Cabinet into being through sheer force of will without a public election. Not to toot our own journalistic horn, but Off the Press had no small hand in the public unveiling of this affront to democracy, attempting to reveal the existence of this death knell to our republic to the student body before the Stute or even the SGA themselves did.
However, the story of SGA-gate, as historians have taken to call this monumental lapse in Lady Liberty’s gaze, does not end there. While the SGA did begrudgingly bless the student body with an actual election for president this semester, what they presented to the vote-starved public was hardly better than the non-existence of last semester’s “election.” Instead of the rigorous American tradition of choosing between two subpar options that no one is truly happy with, this time the SGA has not even deigned to give us the illusion of choice. What in previous years was a jam-packed field full of budding politicians with ambitious campaign promises that would ultimately never come to fruition has now been reduced to a single campaign doing a political victory lap around a despondent public.
Students eager to cast their hard-won vote on their choice of candidates after seconds of policy analysis were disappointed last week when they were presented with only the option to choose between the campaign-that-cannot-legally-be-named and an “abstain” vote, and while an abstain victory would be the singular funniest moment in political history since Charles Sumner got beaned on the head with a cane in Congress, it is generally considered a spoiler vote and most polls are not giving it high odds of success. By the time this article will be released, we will most likely be under the [Name Removed Due to Censorship] administration, which the fine political scholars at Off the Press don’t really have a problem with but we’ll grumble at the lack of choice like proper satirists anyway.
In classic Stevens fashion, students are either ignorant of the high-octane political drama going on in the hallowed halls of the SGA or they simply don’t care. “All I know is, they’ve got my vote!” said one student who asked us to put their name in the article because it’s been their dream since they were a small child to have their name printed in a reputable newspaper, but whom we had to tearfully turn down due to the Stute’s draconian and patronizing rules regarding the whole name thing. “I’ve asked for them to give my vote back, but they keep saying that they forgot it at home and that they’ll give it back tomorrow, but then I ask tomorrow and they forgot it again! I’m honestly starting to get kind of ticked off!”
Off the Press is proud of our long-standing, new found tradition of hard-hitting political journalism as we stick it to The ManTM one hilarious article at a time. We lament the lack of civic involvement that resulted in only one un-nameable campaign for SGA President and VPO. Everyone reading this who did not help nominate a different candidate should begin to atone for their dereliction of democratic ideals by prostrating themselves in front of the statue of George Washington that they have in their house and reciting the Constitution from memory until they feel suitably punished for their transgressions.
Off The Press is a satirical Opinion column written and organized by Off Center, often used to joke about current Stevens issues and campus news.
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