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How do you buy votes if the ballot is secret ? Not saying that people don't try, and there is that odd politician who does come only from money. By and large m
by sonink 10y ago
How do you buy votes if the ballot is secret ?
Not saying that people don't try, and there is that odd politician who does come only from money. By and large most chief ministers victory can be explained not by money, but more by identity/group based politics.
This is pretty much also exactly the same to what happens in the US.
- peteretep 10y ago> How do you buy votes if > the ballot is secret? Is this a rhetorical question? The answer is by distributing 2,000INR notes to people and transporting them to the polling station, relying on reciprocity and promising more to come if you get elected.
- sonink 10y agoNo its not rhetorical and your answer is naive at best. People in India will take money if you give it to them, but they will vote on identity only. This is because there is no reciprocity - once the voting is done the politicians have no incentive to pay them again and they don't. The only reciprocity that exists, if at all, is along identity and everyone gets it. Take a look at any CM in any state of India - their win is largely explained by identity and not money. The current PM who was two time CM of a state, doesnt even have a house to his name.
- peteretep 10y ago> People in India will take money > if you give it to them, but they > will vote on identity only Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. > This is because there is no reciprocity This is the opposite to what published science suggests, and thus needs something stronger than "here's what I think should be the case"
- sonink 10y agoThats because that published science is born of a prejudiced mind. I have spent my entire life in this country and been a part of the political process in many different ways. Pick any random person from the street in India and he will tell you as much.
- marklgr 10y agoI don't know about India, but in a large part of the rest of the world, money funds campaigns and buys influence, which is extremely correlated to winning elections.
- ActsJuvenile 10y agoPaid voters are given pre-filled ballots. They go inside polling station, drop the prefilled ballot in the box, and bring new blank ballot outside to paymaster to collect their cash.
- pkd 10y agoThat's not how elections work in India anymore. We've not had ballots to fill for almost 20 years now.
- tumbling_stone 10y agoPoliticians don't dole out cash and go pray that the voters will honor their agreement. They have a way of making sure that their bought votes are delivered to them. Buying votes happens mostly in slums and other non-affluent areas. These are the places where the concept of privacy hasn't yet formed and everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Also, a politician is not expected to work for them his whole term. It is natural to see your local representative only during the times of election. So politicians have the two key ingredients to enforce an implicit contract. But the biggest weapon these politicians have is intimidation. Since it's not hard to mostly figure out the faction that refused to vote for the money they took, they can be persecuted and intimidated. Of course there's no official source to cite this. My driver is very chatty and quite insightful about the politics in India.
- Nano2rad 10y agoVote is secret in India. There is no way for politician to find out where your vote went except some guess work, but still people vote for the politiician who paid the money which is strange. There have been no news report about politicians taking revenge because people did not vote for him. If such news had come election commission would do something and media would not be silent.