Dear USG,

I will not be voting in your 2010 election.

I guess you could say this stems from my freshman year when I went to vote for the College of Food, Agricultural and Environmental Sciences senator and there was only one candidate, who in the end did not receive more than 20 to 30 votes.

Not that you seem to mind that too much. Your response rates for my two other years at this university have been abysmal and you really seem content to keep it that way. There are no “registration” drives, merely a smorgasbord of half-baked “hip” slate campaigns.

The real problem can be traced to USG as a whole, and more precisely what it is the organization does. Before I sat down to write this note, I talked with several friends who have been at this university for as long as I have, and have been as involved, if not more involved, in student organizations as I have (I was an officer of Block “O,” the largest student organization on campus, for two years). We talked about the start of the USG campaign season and tried to reflect on what the past administration had done. We were shocked to find that we could not name a single thing; no program, no initiative, no decision that affected the undergraduate body as a whole.

In fact I could only recall one or two actions that the USG had initiated during my time here. When giving all off-campus houses a single window alarm and adding a couple of streetlights around campus is the pinnacle of your perceived impact, something is wrong.

This is the problem that you have to face. The perceived image is that you are a group of resume-stuffing overachievers who overestimate your organization, which has little to no effect on the average student. That is a harsh reality. I know a lot of students involved in USG and I am happy to count many of them as friends, but a wake-up call is overdue.

How do you fix this? Easy, you change the perception. Start campaigning with actual platforms instead of dumb, pseudo-witty campaign slogans and endorsements by the basketball team. Get rid of slates and have all candidates earn their positions by having them campaign in the actual community they will claim to represent. Above all, have an impact. Start by publicly laying out an agenda with realistic but impactful goals. Give students a reason to care about the elections. Give us a reason to care about you.

I hope you can change my mind. I am rooting for you. A strong and impactful student government is a force to be reckoned with when it truly represents the students en mass. But until you do this, I, and the vast majority of the student body you claim to represent, will not be participating in the elections.