Thankfully I Won't Be Here Next Year

In contrast to last year's first-ever direct elections for SA president and executive vice-president, this year's election seems to have generated relatively little excitement among students.

I won't get into the issues here, but instead I'll take a look at the candidates' websites.

For president, we have Vince Andrews and Andy Brokman.

Andrews' site is not the most visually appealing. Boring and simplistic. He gets credit for editing down his platform to a couple of key points on the home page. His visitor counter reads 804, which looks comically small when preceded by five zeros. Comparing that kind of traffic to what I get on this blog, it's not too impressive considering that voting begins tomorrow morning. Andrews will probably need at least a couple times that many votes to have a chance to win. In summary, his site is functional but unimpressive.

Brokman's site is the best of any candidate's. He borrows a lot of concepts from modern campaign-style websites: the YouTube video featured prominently, an RSS feed, a lot of links at the top. He has too much text on the front page in his welcome message; no one is going to read all of that. (Scrolling to the bottom, the "God bless you and God bless Cornell University" is just pathetic.) Brokman benefits from the writing he's done for WVBR and OneCornell; he pulls that content onto his "Brokman's Blog" section. Overall, a job well done. If a student actually takes the time to research the candidates on the internet, I think he or she would swing to Brokman.

For executive vice president, Mensah is the only one with a website. His site is... interesting. The header is terrible, and I'm not sure why the text of the links at the top turn to black when you put the cursor over them. Mensah relies on the power of a few endorsements, but he hasn't been endorsed by anyone we should care about. Segway kid gets the big picture, but has no relevance to anything. Two other endorsers are members of organizations, but of course their larger groups have not endorsed Mensah. And two other endorsements come from his friends. Well, at least he has five votes. Funny that the "In the News" section is still "coming soon," what with voting starting tomorrow and everything.

Oh, well.