If UCSC students couldn't be bothered to resist a proposal to hoover more bucks out of their wallets, it seems like cut-and-dried proof that the Banana Slugs are going to be with us in the D3 ranks for the foreseeable future.
But that's what you keep misconstruing. They didn't have to vote no to resist the proposal. The proposal had
two ways it could be defeated:
1. If 76% of the student body choose not to vote
2. If the proposal got 25% of the vote, and more than 1/3 of the votes were no.
Because there were two completely different ways to defeat the measure, there were two ways, in the moment, students could decide to oppose it. They could not vote, or they could vote no. In that scenario, a non-vote cannot be considered a positive thing, no matter how much you want it to be, or how much you smite my karma. Yes, we know
now that if a student chose to oppose it by staying home, they made the wrong choice, as it were. But if I were trying to get that measure passed, I would not look at the non-voters as people on my side.