Student government elections require a hundred peer signatures and an 80 percent average

Evidence

The whole process was astonishingly bureaucratized, a lesson in institutional democracy. You had to sign the application and get a parent’s signature. You needed to provide a host of things: a photocopy of your school ID, a written recommendation from a teacher, a copy of your transcript, and other supplementary items. You had to have earned an 80 percent or higher grade average. You could not have failed a class or have had any type of school infraction. And you needed a hundred signatures (in blue ink) from your fellow students. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 347

Categorization

• CANDY: A hundred signatures in blue ink for a high-school class-office race is a delightfully absurd bureaucratic detail worth retelling.