<p>US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates '65</p>
<p><a href=“http://dogstreetjournal.com/story/3734[/url]”>http://dogstreetjournal.com/story/3734</a></p>
<p>He seems like a good choice. Granted, if it were my graduation, I wouldn’t settle for less than Jon Stewart but I guess I’ll eventually have to get used to the idea that it’s not going to happen…</p>
<p>And how about that whole botched Student Assembly election spectacle? lmao…</p>
<p>Don’t even get me started on that.</p>
<p>Yeah the SA election is ridiculous… What they should do is release the logs of the election to the public to make sure no ‘funny business’ goes on.</p>
<p>What? That doesn’t even make sense. The logs are just raw computer data that they just need to translate into the votes. This isn’t a vast conspiracy, it was a mistake. Everything will be fixed in time.</p>
<p>I’m not saying there was a conspiracy, however, in situations like this you have to be careful because now there is a reason to doubt the result (not in my mind, but I’m sure some will doubt). </p>
<p>Anyone with a very minor amount of computer programming experience can easily write a program that can interpret this data. I, for one, would like to give it a go.</p>
<p>Can you imagine what releasing that data to the public would do? People would inevitably mess it up, and then there would be three or four different results. As a current SA Senator said:</p>
<p>“The manual log file is what would be used to audit an election for integrity; it is as secure or more secure than the automatically generated results.”</p>
<p>I would have agreed with you if they had released the results today. The sheer amount of delay, however, makes it clear that whoever is writing this program has no clue what he’s doing.</p>
<p>In the end, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s not like we’re electing the President of the US. The Informer predicted a pretty large margin of victory for Pilchen (and last year they were accurate to 1%) so I’m guessing that unless the election goes the other way, there won’t be much or any concern over its validity.</p>
<p>Back on topic…</p>
<p>I think Gates will be an interesting commencement speaker. He’s just one example of the high-profile graduates that William and Mary continues to produce.</p>
<p>Gates is a great choice for commencement speaker, despite what anyone’s political views may be. As with Jon Stewart, since he did it only three years ago, he probably will not do a W&M graduation speech for quite some time.</p>
<p>As with the SA election snafu, I just can’t help but think that there is a scandal, because SA “politics” have gotten a lot more intense in the years I spent at W&M. Sure, there was a “mistake” for daylight savings time’s early arrival, but the people at SIN or SA should have put this into account beforehand.</p>