Students, get engaged

Students who didn’t vote gave up their ability to change the future of the university.

Last week, despite four tickets running for student government, only 12.72 percent of Temple’s student body turned out to vote.

We, along with the Temple Student Government hopefuls, were optimistic that more students would take initiative to choose which platform appealed to their wants and needs.

“Ideally, we’d be at 100 percent,” Gaelen McCartney, TSG’s elections commissioner told The Temple News. “But realistically, we’d like to see like 25 to 30 percent.”

Candidates were optimistic as well. Aron Cowen and Kelly Dawson of the winning Empower TU ticket cited Penn State’s turnout of about 38 percent, saying there was no reason Temple couldn’t compete with that statistic.

Other schools like the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pennsylvania both saw higher turnouts than in previous years—Penn saw about 50 percent of students voting in its last election, the Daily Pennsylvanian reported.

While this year’s turnout is still the second-highest recorded since 2004, the group of 4,112 students who did vote certainly don’t represent Temple’s total population, especially since the student body has grown about 1.2 percent from the last academic year.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: participating in elections is the way to have a hand in deciding the future of the university. Not only was it important, it was easy—voting took a matter of seconds.

Those who are unhappy about current circumstances and decided not to vote wasted an opportunity to see change.

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