Endorsement not in the ‘Future’s’ future

For a full review of the staff's thought process on endorsement, see the pros and cons list here.

To see the candidates' columns, click here.

----------

The goal of this column is to announce that the Central Florida Future will not be endorsing a candidate for the 2011 Student Government Association Presidential elections.

I ask you, then, to not take these next words lightly: We did not reach this conclusion because of a dislike of the candidates.

We chose not to endorse a candidate because the tickets are too similar in their respective goals and neither ticket stood out enough to warrant a shining endorsement. All candidates involved have sufficient experience and clear platform promises, none of which we objected to.

Endorsements are challenges that don't just involve a senior editor making a decision on behalf of an entire staff. It takes several senior editors and reporters to come to a conclusion about which ticket will be preferable.

The aim is to take an educated, experienced group of individuals and formulate a well-researched opinion on which ticket is best for the community.

Walking into the conference room, a few editors were convinced that endorsing was the answer. When presented with the argument that endorsing could be seen as bias, they made the legitimate point that not endorsing could look just as biased — in this case, toward pleasing SGA instead of taking a stand.

We clearly separate the Opinions section of our newspaper from the News, Variety and Sports sections. We hope you, the reader, can differentiate between the facts and the editorials.

As someone who has been heavily involved with the military since birth, I have an attachment to the idea of endorsing a candidate. Key military endorsements are an important boon for national candidates and, in this case, I had to set aside the mindset of partisanship.

As a staff, we were impressed with how open and willing to talk this year's candidates were. I appreciated late-night phone calls, deep discussions about articles and candidates' availability whenever I needed to talk to them.

We think both platforms present interesting, new ideas that help propel UCF into the 21st century and bring interconnectivity to parts of campus that have been ignored. We also enjoyed the talks about transparency and bringing new faces to student government, as these have been challenges for SGA in the past year.

We've decided to allow each presidential candidate 300 words to describe how they differ from their opposition.

We've also offered them another 300 words to speak as a combined ticket on the one topic that clearly separates them from their opposing ticket. They will run unedited and exactly as they were sent to us.

Registered student organizations, members of student government, or other individuals who would like to submit their personal endorsements may do so. We'll publish them online, unedited and just as they were written.

We hope that, after reading these, you can reach a stronger conclusion about who you'd like to see working in the SGA office for the next year.

The most important thing we can ask for from students regarding these elections is that voter turnout increases from previous years.

We wish the best of luck to both tickets both in these elections and in the future. I have a feeling that it won't be the last time we work together.

For a full review of the staff's thought process on endorsement, see the pros and cons list here.

To see the candidates' columns, click here.