Last June, when LSA senior Eugene Kang announced he was running for City Council in the Ward 2 Democratic primary against former Republican mayoral candidate Stephen Rapundalo and held an afternoon deck party as one of his first campaign events, I stopped by to meet Kang and evaluate his chances. If elected, he would have been the first University student on City council in more than 30 years, providing students with a voice on a Council that appears to become more disconnected from, and even hostile to, Ann Arbor's student population with each passing year.

I liked what I saw. Kang seemed to be a near-perfect candidate; he was bright, personable, enthusiastic and reasonable, with exciting ideas about development and about engaging students in city government, and with none of the inane fringe ideas that have characterized many other student candidates for office in recent memory.

More importantly, for a student candidate, Kang seemed to be in a particularly good position to win the Democratic primary. He was a progressive candidate running against a former Republican; he was a lifelong Ann Arbor resident; and, comfortably sporting an open-collared blue Oxford shirt with a navy blazer, he looked respectable and professional enough to make a good impression with homeowners in his ward, many of whom associate University students with noise violations and other Animal House-style antics. He also had strong ties with the local Korean community, which provided a small but dedicated base of support and helped him raise several times more money than his opponent. And he had a smart group of campaign advisers who were passionate about student representation in city government, including Law School student Alex Donn, who was introduced to Kang after writing an academic paper about the obstacles to student voting in Ann Arbor.

Kang's campaign also came at a time when student interest in city politics, long dormant, appeared to be starting to spread. With a City Council that was threatening to ban couches from house porches and preparing to pass an anti-student parking measure during the summer, undergraduate and graduate students - many of them urban planning majors - began to coalesce around weblogs such as arborupdate.com, annarborisoverrated.com and goodspeedupdate.com, where they conversed about anti-student City Council actions, New Urbanism and the Greenway proposal. Urban planning graduate student Dale Winling was just launching the New West Side Association, a neighborhood association intended to counteract the traditional homeowner-run, and politically powerful, Ann Arbor neighborhood associations by representing the political interests of students and renters. Even The Ann Arbor News took notice of the sudden resurgence of student interest in local politics: In an article headlined "Students want their say," News reporter Tom Gantert, while allowing that "few would argue that college students have a say in the Ann Arbor political arena," cited Kang, the New West Side and the local blogs as signs that "this mostly transient population may be seeking a stronger voice in local politics."

Unfortunately, student candidates in Ann Arbor City Council primaries face one nearly insurmountable challenge: The primaries take place in early August, when most University students are out of town. The second ward, where Kang resides, is home to a large student population in the Hill residence halls - from September to April. The Hill residence halls are abandoned during the spring and summer semesters and, as a result, the voters in Kang's ward during his primary were almost exclusively local residents. Kang also received no support from the local Democratic Party establishment, which, hoping to secure the formerly Republican-held Council seat, had recruited Rapundalo from the Republican Party and had no interest in a contested primary. Despite his unusual appeal to residents and a well-run campaign, Kang lost the primary by about 10 percent, or 95 votes.

There can be no doubt that, had the election been held while regular classes were in session, Kang would have won the primary handily. Under the current system, though, the only way Hill dorm residents could have voted for him was through absentee ballots. In the absence of any effort by Voice Your Vote to educate the ward's student voters on how to vote absentee, it simply didn't happen. Ward 2's second precinct, which comprises Mary Markley Residence Hall and only a few nearby houses, cast zero ballots.