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Choosing not to choose a candidate

Newspapers have a long tradition of endorsing candidates during elections but over the years, the Gazette has wavered back and forth on the issue. Being the only campus newspaper and a large source of campus information for many students, an endorsement could hold a tremendous amount of weight for undecided voters.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with endorsements. Sometimes, they’re misunderstood by average readers as blatant campaigning or advertising — a reach beyond a newspaper’s mandate. But the purpose is really to publicize a nearly-unanimous sentiment among a group of editors. Publicizing these sentiments merely improves transparency.

An endorsement would also run alongside nearly two weeks of election coverage and two days of special issues which contain all the information a voter needs to make an informed choice. Hopefully, interested readers would read this information and make a choice for themselves, using the endorsement as just another perspective.

But despite the validity and appropriateness of endorsing a candidate, the Gazette wont’ be doing so this year.

It makes democratic sense to throw whatever weight an endorsement carries behind the best candidate — especially when they might not be getting the attention they deserve. But in most years, at least recently, we’ve been presented with a crop of mediocre, flawed candidates who appeal to students with trivial conveniences, often without a thorough understanding of the very position they’re trying to win. There needs to be a candidate who’s head and shoulders above the rest. This year we’re left asking for more.

What’s needed on the Gazette side is a near-consensus and an informed group of editors who have followed the election to a greater extent than the average student. But maybe it speaks to the times when this is mostly limited to the news team, full-time staff and a sprinkling of other editors. It would be unrealistic to say every editor is informed enough about University Students’ Council politics to fairly endorse someone.

An endorsement will motivate some people to vote for one candidate over another. If people are voting, they’ll hopefully make their choice based on the almost nausea-inducing amount of election coverage this year.

If students can’t make up their minds based on a significant amount of fair, balanced and decidedly neutral content, they should probably just give up their ballot.

—The Gazette Editorial Board

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