Same old same old...

By STEW RICHLAND

Hello Mr. and Mrs. Century Village and all our residents around the globe.

I attended the election committee meeting and I must congratulate Anita for doing a great job as the moderator. Hard job when most of the members are part of every UCO committee.

Have you ever read a detective novel?  You open the book, read  page one, hoping that the hook of interest will pull you into the story line.  If it does, and the author has imbedded  lots of red herrings to throw you off, and at the end, you close the book, smile you feel satisfied, it was a good read.

The elections committee was not a good read.  It was more like the Titanic heading for an iceberg.  This meeting was a classic example of the “same old, same old.”

Above all, if fairness is a value we care about, the voting system process that we were presented with is an offence to any conception of fair political representation.

For 54 years I have taught my students what democracy means.  The voting system allows the public to feel the complexity and range of views that candidates wish to share with them. Public debate and argument is an integral part of the democratic process.  The public deserves no less. They do not deserve restrictive political debate in which the group in power, and often behind closed doors, control and dictate the nature of and rules by which elections are conducted here in Century Village.

Lets review some of the issues discussed at the meeting.

Each candidate would file a biography, which outlines their education, past involvement with UCO,  and a very brief summary of why they are running for office and what they hope to accomplish.  This form is submitted to the UCO reporter along with a photo of the candidate and then it will be published in the UCO Reporter just prior to the election.  That's how the Delegate Assembly gets to learn about the slate of candidates running for office.

One of the assumptions of this process is that every voting delegate actually reads the UCO Reporter.  I write this with tongue-in-cheek. Lets assume that this is true, that all the delegates do read the UCO Reporter, do we really expect our delegates to evaluate the qualifications  of the candidates based on such limited information.  It’s like expecting a theologian  to be inspired by the Readers Digest version of the Bible. 

Another fallacy is the candidates forum.  This was a clumsy attempt to show how  benevolent UCO can be by providing a solution to the problem of having the Delegate Assembly meet the candidates.  The chair said the Candidates Forum was  used in the past, but did pose a problem because the election committee expected close to 20 candidates to run for the Executive Board and speculated on the number of prospective candidates to fill the open UCO positions. Naturally the venue for this event would be the Club House. One wonders how they could get permission to use the theater for this event when the Emperor and Empress denied this type of event to the Plebeians.

One sage observer quipped that the forum could last five hours but that’s fine.  Another, jumped in and said you cannot expect the Delegates to sit through an event like this, and how many do you expect to show up.  Who will moderate the event?  No response when this question was posed.  What a charade!  What can be concluded from this? Those involved could not care less about fair play and the political process here in the Village.

A defender of the status quo said that candidates could post flyers on Association bulletin boards announcing that they are running for office along with their phone number to invite the candidate to their Association meeting.  Good idea?  Well it takes a great deal of leg work to get to all the Associations. A volunteer posts the announcement, walks on to the next building etc. However,  there are many mean spirited people who, for what reason(s) known only to themselves, rip the poster off the bulletin boards.  Other associations have their bulletin boards encased in glass so no announcement can be posted.  Some  associations will not allow notices to be displayed and pull them off as a matter of Association policy. Do you know that there are at least 30 plus associations that do not have any bulletin boards at all. “Bodinga”  No wonder so few Delegates attend meetings. Wow, its not posted. How then do we communicate with these residents. Maybe with a broadband connection? Let us assume that all Associations did play fair and invite the candidate(s) to their meetings for a “meet and greet,”  and knowing that the election is in March,  limits the effectiveness of this process.

If fairness is a value we all cherish, then I ask why is the President of UCO allowed to “toot his horn,” present his bio and boast what he feels is his legacy as UCO president in the Reporter when others are denied equal access to this forum. One wonders when the President’s article was written, since the Reporter staff needed time to prepare for publication. One could only assume that it was done prior to the Election Committee meeting held last week. This is another example of how Dave and his cohorts,  respect the fairness doctrine we care about, and how they view the voting system. It  is an offense to any conception of what the democratic process stands for.

This grotesque and unfair voting system must change!!! Like the message in the song, “What’s New, How’s UCO Treating You?”  It’s bizarre at its best, and as a voting system it is an offense to all those who believe in the idea that free elections matter and how fair they are.