The election that will determine the makeup of the entire GSB Senate, as well as the president and vice-president, will take place March 3 through 6 – less than two weeks away.

Have you heard from your senators yet?

We haven’t either, but there’s a perfectly logical explanation for this: They aren’t campaigning. Of the 37 senate seats up for grabs, only one race is competitive – three candidates are competing for the two College of Agriculture seats. The other 20 candidates listed on the ballot face no competition, and at least another 15 seats will be filled by write-ins because no one bothered to run.

The mere existence of an election is insufficient grounds for calling its results democratic. This year’s election does not even rise to the undesirable title of popularity contest. For that to happen, there would have to be a contest.

Why the scarcity of candidates? Part of the blame must fall on the Senate itself. Can the legislative branch boast of any significant projects or legislation that it has accomplished in the past year that were not initiated by the executive branch? A significant portion of meetings during this semester have been consumed with debating a bill specifying consequences for senators who skip or arrive late to meetings. Only 11 current senators are seeking election, more than half of which were mid-year appointments. The message is clear – this is a group that not even its own members want to stay involved with.

We suppose this is the part of the editorial where we should whine about the apathy of the general student population, but before we can blame students for not getting involved, we question whether they had adequate opportunity or incentive to do so.

In order to be an official candidate for GSB Senate, a student must have attended a candidate seminar, collected 100 signatures and paid a $10 filing fee by Feb. 10. Not insurmountable requirements, but considering that in recent years write-in candidates have been elected with as few as seven total votes, some candidates may make a conscious and not altogether irrational decision to save $10.

Attending a candidate seminar seems like a simple enough task, and GSB Election Commissioner Mansoor Khadir told us that around 30 were held this year, instead of the usual four. When all these seminars were held is a mystery that the Daily Editorial Board is still trying to figure out.

Seminar advertisement was haphazard – two letters to the editor, an advertisement in the Daily that ran just days before the filing deadline and some chalking around the Memorial Union. The only people adequately informed of the seminar times were the current GSB senators who received two e-mails from Commissioner Khadir.

When asked how he would rank the Election Commission in terms of getting people involved and on the ballot, Khadir said he would give them an A.

Granted, the problem of lack of participation runs deep, but an acknowledgment of the problem would be appreciated.