EDITORIAL: POLITICOS.COM

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Bureaucratic rules on election homepages serve no logical purpose.

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Alas, we will see no such experiments this year. The Student Association has decided to crack down on WWW campaigning, limiting the size and content of pages severely (2,000 words, two medium-sized images and no links). The rules will surely limit candidates' abilities to present themselves to the student body -- and for what?

There is some possible unfairness in WWW page use: Some students have bigger accounts than others, for example. But such problems could have been addressed by a simple size limit (one megabyte, for example) which is small enough for everyone's account yet big enough to hold a lot of information, photos and graphics. Such a limitation, which was suggested by several SA members, would be easy to enforce and considerably less restrictive.

It makes no sense to impose unnecessary regulations. We urge the SA to reconsider its overwrought and pointless rules and adopt looser ones. Besides, if we judge from last year's experience, an elaborate homepage is not going to make the difference between winning and losing an election: The candidates with flashy pages all lost last year.

This item appeared in the Opinion section of the January 31, 1997 issue.

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