CHARLES Kennedy, the Liberal Democrats’ former leader, was last night elected as rector for Glasgow University by a landslide majority.
Mr Kennedy, who is a former president of Glasgow University Union, won the ballot by a margin of almost two to one over his nearest rival.
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2 Comments
I think that it’s extremely unfair to brand the rector election as merely a ‘landslide’, especially if we consider that in step one of the STV vote more votes were cast against Kennedy than for him. Fair enough if he was outright winner in step one alone, but this simply wasn’t the case.
It is worth remembering that right up until polling day there was a very close contest between Charles and Aamer Anwar for the position and this was reflected by both camps pushing the boat out in the final hours before the polls closed. Whereas one side had union backing and money to burn, the other was on an exceptionally tight budget. The main goal for the Aamer camp was achieved in the election as we successfully mobilised more than a thousand to vote to fund education and not war.
As a representative of the Aamer 4 Rector campaign, I congratulate Charles Kennedy and wish him every success, but what I don’t appreciate is political splin to make the result seem more clear-cut than it actually was.
See Mark that’s what you get for stealing the Scotsman’s headline.
However, I’m somewhat bemused by their reporting of the result. If the election was by STV how come there were more votes distributed in the second round than the two lading candidates garnered in the first round.
Of course this is possible in subsequent exclusion over more distributions of remaining three candidates. The misuse of electoral language does not bode well for one of the papers of record here in Scotland, not now that STV is an accuality in local elections. Hopefully they’ll soon learn the nuanaces, after last year the details of the count wasn’t the story unfortunately.