By Dylan Huber

Every October, when Homecoming is announced, election season promptly begins. Without fail, dozens of Homecoming posters begin donning the campus halls and classrooms with incredible rapidity, each containing an admirable request to vote student(s) into receiving certain noble titles, including “King and Queen,” or “Prince and Princess.” To win elections, these posters seem an utmost necessity. 

Posters are, to me, the central area of intrigue within Homecoming. Upon looking at any poster, one will notice that very little is usually said about the actual responsibilities of each noble title. This is most likely attributable to the fact that the simple exclamation of ”Vote for me for Homecoming Queen!” sounds significantly more glamorous than “Vote me for Homecoming Queen in order to fulfill these assorted responsibilities.” Ironically, this tradition can be viewed as a commentary on the current condition of most traditional monarchies. To wit, people care little about what the current King of the United Kingdom can actually do, but they care greatly about the title “King of the United Kingdom.” Titles make up a large part of each poster, but it is always a shallow, purely nominal embrace. 


Despite what one might expect, however, specific reasons to vote for the candidates themselves are also usually absent. Instead, most opt for the tried-and-true “picture and name” approach with no further description of achievements or qualities needed. Fittingly, the mere names of the candidates seem to be given more importance than anything else. This, however, grants each poster following this approach an almost esoteric quality. One is seemingly expected to know who each and every person featured is, but given the incredibly large student population, that seems unlikely. Those who do not know the people featured are thus left to either assume they are important or disregard them completely. 

Indeed, if titles are merely nominal, and many candidates may be unknown, how do posters actually influence the vote of students? What reason does a student have to vote for one candidate over another? I find two possibilities: either I am greatly underestimating the general fame of campaigning students, and just seeing certain known students’ posters is enough to get one to sprint to the virtual ballot box to forgo all other candidates; or students, given nothing else to consider, choose their favored candidate based on slight aesthetic differences between posters. Either way, posters appear more absurdly meaningless for it. If it’s the former that decides elections, why even bother with posters? Popular students’ victories would seem inevitable with or without them. If it’s the second, then my question is this: if an election is seriously decided by aesthetic differences, then is it even a meaningful election? Either way, is it really worth putting up posters in the first place?


And yet, these campaign posters are a tradition I’ve personally always looked forward to, purely for this distinctive inscrutability. They are so absurd in their very existence, so decidedly avoidant of anything that would give them actual electoral worth. They are positively confounding to the outside observer, and completely useless to anyone seeking any electorally-relevant information. However, to me, that’s exactly what makes them so much fun to observe. It is the very fact they are so enigmatic, so inexplicable in their categorization of what is and isn’t important, that makes them so indelibly endearing.