Far be it from The Varsity to shout down the deafening clamour of the masses who voted to join the CFS. We’re just a little giddy right now, if only because the CFS Joint Referendum Committee is no longer casting a watchful eye over the proceedings.

The Joint Referendum Committee (for those of you tuning in late in the program) should have been a neutral and objective body to approve campaign material. In reality, the JRC was a coalition between two paid full-time CFS employees and two volunteers from the Students’ Administrative Council.

That the JRC was biased there can be almost no doubt. The committee acted by consensus rather than by vote, leaving its members open to intimidation tactics and pressures from the CFS. They disallowed campaign posters from the “No” side for technical points, but they approved CFS posters and brochures that take credit for every tuition freeze in Canada. The delays and prohibitions kept the “No” side from giving their side—and prevented the CFS from having to answer to them.

CFS censorship also extended to various campus newspapers, The Varsity included. Copies of Trinity College’s Salterrae containing an anti-CFS editorial went missing. Last Monday, ex-SAC president Alex Kerner sent out an e-mail demanding that all copies of Monday’s Varsity be confiscated, since they contained an unapproved ad from the “No” side. The Varsity subsequently disappeared from Sidney Smith and U.C.’s Diabolos.

And then there’s the vote. Contrary to almost every other election everywhere, the CFS referendum campaign didn’t end until voting closed. Last week this meant students going to vote at Sidney Smith had to first make their way past the CFS booth and CFS members handing out buttons and pamphlets. The reason campaigns close before voting opens is the same reason we don’t go to polls manned by soldiers armed with machine guns—so that external pressures don’t prevent voters from making rational, objective decisions.

It now seems there were voting irregularities as well. Several people have made official complaints that they were urged to vote “Yes” by the polling clerks.

This referendum is important, if only to show us how little the average observer knows about this proud organization of which we are now a part. It is interesting to note that we still don’t know why several member universities are suing the CFS. By effectively preventing the opposition from even stating that, the CFS has not been required to provide a defence.

Of course this is how most political organizations would like to run a referendum, but that isn’t how democracy works. There needs to be a neutral supervisory body, if only to satisfy all concerned that the results were fair. The Varsity believes there should be an immediate investigation into the referendum procedure to determine the validity of the results.

It is important, though, to keep this in perspective. The fact that the CFS won doesn’t mean that we will soon be having parades and showering our new overlords with rose petals. (At least, we don’t think it will.) It’s hard to get too worked up about a referendum where only 15 per cent of students even bothered to vote. And while it would be fun to draw pithy analogies between this referendum and elections in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, we’ll close instead with another, less accurate vote, in which 50 per cent of online Varsity readers said student politicians are dinks. The Varsity is inclined to agree.