CornellWatch

This morning, the Undergraduate Student Elections began, and, with online voting continuing until Thursday morning, you probably want to spend every waking minute contemplating what candidate will serve you best — especially considering that this is the first time that the student body at large has been privileged enough to directly elect the S.A. President and Vice President. The best candidate will be humbly intelligent, modestly eloquent, and — most important of all — wildly popular. Just to make sure your vote “counts,” why not rank the candidates based on how popular they are on Facebook? The problem that this wily blogger par excellence encountered was that almost all of the candidates were wise enough to protect their profiles, so I couldn’t access the total number of friends they had in the Cornell network. Luckily, you can still see how many mutual friends you have in common, so the game is simple:

1) Facebook all the candidates and compile an Excel spreadsheet of how many mutual friends (mutches! myootches?) you’ve got in common. Add up the Pres and VP totals, using an Excel formula if you’re extra wily. Make some notes about the 6 friends whose profile pic thumbnails the Facebook God has randomly chosen, why not?

2) Compare the total mutual friends of each Slate and begin to create an arbitrary ranking system. You can even install an optional weighting system with Excel formulas — multiplying by 1.5 if you really liked all 6 of those random thumbnail people, or maybe by 0.1 if the candidates’ FB pic kind of sucked.

3) Decide which Pres and VP candidate to vote for based on who has the highest Excel-calculated number.

Here’s my (unweighted) results, with some commentary and followed by the Top 10 Emptiest Campaign Promises:

1) “Winners”: Chris Basil and Nikki Junewicz (Team “You don’t know us? Do you even go here?”)

2) Runners-Up: Rammy Salem and Ola Williams (Team “Yes we can, Superman”)

3) Bronze: Scott Purdy and Emlyn Diakow (Team “ALL CAPS”)

4) Fail: Tony Miller and Emily Cusick (Team “We wrote our campaign pitch in the third person”)

5) Epic Fail Part Un: Andrew Brokman and Andy Gindy (Team “We recorded a fireside video chat in earnest”)

5) Epic Fail Part Deux: Jeff Rehberger and Ruslan Gudnyy (Team “One of us didn’t even show up to the WVBR debate”)

7) UNSUBSCRIBE: Murtza Manzur and Jon Dobrin (Team “Our 2-ply toilet paper crusade is not a mockery of Cornell’s election system”)

Just FYI: As of 9:19am today, I had 1,117 total friends on Facebook — which is above average in general but pretty subpar if I want to call myself a budding socialgay. Out of that thousand+, 538 (about 48%) are from the Cornell network. Also FYI: I’m going to vote for the toilet paper guys, just because their Youtube video was hilarious and because I like to “subvert” ranking systems — even my own.

TOP 10 EMPTIEST CAMPAIGN PROMISES

10) “If there’s enough money left over, we may just put it toward an underground tunnel system (but don’t hold us to that one).”

9) “A vote for Tony Miller and Emily Cusick is a vote for the best candidates.”

8) “Address student life issues such as the Ithaca Noise Ordinance and develop a Leasing Policy for students in Collegetown.” (Sadly.)

7) “ensuring a free SPORTS PASS for all undergraduate students”

6) “Integrating Cornell with the Ithaca community”

5) “Free Bus Pass to All Cornell Students”

4) “creating a CAMPUS PUB for interaction beyond the classroom”

3) “I have a voice.”

2) “If elected, I promise to make the club funding process easier and more comprehensive [sic: comprehensible] so that any freshman can understand it. Vote Brokman and Gindy. We’ll get you your funding.”

1) BB2P

Tags: admins, gamez, join in, popularity, SA

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 10:14 am by D. Evan Mulvihill and is filed under cornell, discuss amongst yourselves, gamez, new media, newsy narrative. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.