Prompt Cast
Scandals and Controversies in the Berkeley High School Student Body Election
TLDR The student body election at Berkeley High School was marred by scandals and controversies, with candidates focusing on issues like efficiency, menstrual products, and gender-neutral bathrooms. The election saw the hacking of the voting system and the subsequent capture of the main suspect, highlighting flaws and features of American democracy.
Timestamped Summary
00:00
The 2019 student body election at Berkeley High School was filled with scandals and controversies, revealing the flaws and features of American democracy.
05:16
In the student body election at Berkeley High School, Robert Ezra ran as a technocrat, wanting to make the election process more efficient and eliminate unnecessary pageantry, while other candidates like Rachel Albert and Lexi Pubs and Deja Connerly focused on specific issues like menstrual products and gender-neutral bathrooms.
09:12
Lexi, a candidate for student body president at Berkeley High School, comes from a different background than most of the other candidates, having experienced homelessness in middle school and advocating for awareness of low-income students.
13:08
Robert Ezra, the elections commissioner at Berkeley High School, is passionate about elections and has implemented modern election innovations such as rank-choice voting and online voting in the school's elections.
16:55
The junior votes were locked up from the beginning, so the swing voters, the freshmen, were the main target for the candidates, with some resorting to bribes and campaign finance violations to win their votes.
20:51
The candidates' campaigns for ASB president at Berkeley High School were getting ugly, with Zach's campaign being relatively clean, until the last week when Lexi and Deja's posters were peed on and they faced emotional tolls.
25:09
The elections commissioner at Berkeley High School realizes that someone has hacked into the voting system, and with six hours left in voting, he decides to set an elaborate trap to catch the hacker in the act.
30:50
The elections commissioner catches the main suspect, Zach, in the act of hacking the voting system and sends him to the principal's office.
35:04
Zach hacked the online voting system because he believed it was rigged against him, taking advantage of a vulnerability in the default passwords of students' school emails, but ultimately got caught.
39:39
Robert Ezra Stern, the student who hacked the high school election, is now serving on the University of Chicago elections and rules committee, where he is applying his experience to run elections more efficiently.
Categories:
Technology
Society & Culture
