Important! If you go to Central, we need your help in our 1999 Bob Jacobson campaign. We want to cover the school with signs at election time. If we have 15 or 20 people helping, we can have a lot more signs and information out in the halls than any of the other candidates. We have to work harder than the other people because teachers will take down our signs. BOB FOR PRESIDENT!!!

(And if you don't go to Central, you can still help us by adding a link to this page and telling your friends about it. If you want to but the BOB in 1999 poster on your page, we'd be really happy if you did.)

If you support Bob Jacobson and you have a homepage, PLEASE put this banner somewhere on your page.

Here's its URL:

http://geocities.datacellar.net/SunsetStrip/Palms/5737/images/bob.gif

Bob Jacobson was created on Tuesday, May 12, 1998, by students at Central Junior High. He is a fictional character, and we asked people to write him in for student council president to protest Student Council's lack of power. We were trying to say that if we elect a fictional person president, it will be just the same as if we have a real person holding the office: nothing will happen.

We started campaigning for Bob on the day we created him. We put up signs around the school and handed out stickers that said things like "Vote for Bob: the least of four evils!". (Three other people were running for President.)

The administration was quite unhappy with our campaign. They probably realized that Bob had a good chance of winning--even though he was a write in canidate, he wasn't allowed to make a speech like all the other candidates, and all the signs we posted were ripped down by administration. We were told, by a student who works in the office, that the people in charge of the election were planning to throw away all ballots that had "Bob Jacobson" written on them, even if people had voted for a real person for the other offices. And that's exactly what happened. (I'll get back to that in a minute.)

We put up several large signs around the school the day before the election. They explained, in detail, why we wanted Bob to win. They were gone after just a few minutes. But we knew that several kids had already seen them. One of the campaign managers spoke with an art teacher at the end of the day. She informed him that the teachers were going to have an emergency staff meeting after school to decide what to do about us.

At the assembly before the election, none of the teachers or principals mentioned Bob Jacobson or write in candidates at all. We went back to our classrooms to vote, and many people just wrote Bob Jacobson on their ballot and turned it in. But, one teacher looked at each ballot before they were sent to the office to be counted. If it said "Bob Jacobson" on it, she would throw it away. We are planning to mention her in next years campaigning. (If we do it again next year; we're still deciding).

At the end of the day, the winners of the election were announced. Bob Jacobson, of course, was not mentioned, since all of the ballots with his name on them were thrown away. I talked to the woman in charge of the election afterwards. She told me that they didn't tally the votes for Bob, since he wasn't a real person, but she would guess that he got around 20 votes. We know that this is absolutely not true. I could name thirty people who told me that they would vote for him, and there are many more than that. In fact, there was a rumor that he got more than 100 votes! The teacher who told me that he got 20 votes was trying to convince me that we didn't hurt the election and that what we had done was no big deal. But, it was pretty obvious that the administration was mad at us.

As I was leaving school, I saw a teacher in the hallway. I asked him if there'd been a staff meeting after school the previous day. He said yes. I asked if they'd talked about StuCo elections. He said yes. I asked if they'd mentioned Bob, or write in candidates. He said "yes, but we didn't mention Bob by name." I'm sure. This convinced me that they did have the emergency staff meeting after all (I was beginning to doubt it since the first two teachers I asked said there wasn't a staff meeting.)

Well, I know this isn't written too well, but I just wrote it as I went. Maybe someday I'll get around to making it better.

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