I stopped by Concordia tonight to check out the post-election CSU party at Reggie’s Bar. The polls closed in the evening and it’s not usually until the wee hours of the morning that the ballots are completely counted and the results given in one shot.

Unfortunately, it was cold outside, way too loud and crowded inside, and I didn’t really know anyone there. Besides, I already know how the results are going to look like.

Multiple sources have told me that for the CSU executive, the right-wing Unity slate has pulled ahead with a significant margin and is expected to win by about 1,000 votes. The Council is about evenly divided between the two groups’ supporters. And the referendum questions – some about increasing fees, the rest pointless opinion surveys – are almost all destined to fail.

We’ll see when I wake up later today whether any of that was correct.

UPDATE: Did I call it, or what?

Election time isn’t over for Concordia’s 30,000 undergraduate students. They’re at the polls until Thursday evening choosing, among other things, a new executive to run the Concordia Student Union.

For those unfamiliar with CSU politics, it’s a rather classic left-vs-right battle, with the left accusing the right of both incompetence and corruption (both accusations have some merit), and the right accusing the left of having no ideas and wanting to bring the university back to the radical protests of 2000-2003.

One of the many shots across the bow is this accusation by a former election chief (herself a candidate for a third party) that she was hired to bias the election in favour of the incumbent party.

This, the Link newspaper contends, led directly to their issues being stolen from the stands and disposed of during polling.

This email was sent to me this afternoon. The allegations are technically baseless, but probably true:

March 28, 2007
For Immediate Release – please forward widely

Concordia newspaper goes missing during student union elections

MONTREAL—For the second year in a row, copies of The Link, Concordia’s independent student newspaper, have gone missing from newsstands during the university’s student elections.

The papers disappeared from the Loyola campus overnight, one day after polling began. The issue contained Concordia Student Union (CSU) election coverage including an article exposing current CSU executives of interfering in the Chief Electoral Officer selection process.

After resigning from his position with the CSU executive last Fall, Taylor Noakes told The Link that the removal of the papers last March was planned by the CSU executive and the University Administration. Neither party will confirm the allegations.

Last March the papers were discovered on a cart in at the university’s shipping and receiving area and were returned to newsstands. A complaint has been filed with Concordia Security, but missing copies of the current issue still haven’t turned up.

UPDATE:  The paper reprinted their press release.