In Kuwait, the parliament elections occur in 2006. There are around 350 candidates that are running for election. It's an interesting process because there is candidate flooding.
But I'm not writing about the candidate flooding - that's in the newspapers every day.
In Kuwait, votes can be bought - and pretty easily. At the voting booths, there are shady areas where you can go if you want to sell your vote for money.
The going rate is 2,000 KD ($6920) for a male vote and 1,500 KD ($5190) for a female vote.
It's probably on the same order as greasing a bouncer $20 in the US. But over here, a Kuwaiti has immense wealth as a birthright. So 20 bucks isn't going to go very far.
There are political cartoons making fun of vote-sellers as sheep. There are comments in the newspapers and radios saying that anyone who would buy a vote has no ethics and will run the country accordingly (obviously). But I don't think it'll matter.
If there are 300 candidates, and the majority wins, I'd guess 30% of the votes would would create a victor. At 1.2 million Kuwaitis, you're looking at about 400,000 votes. If you end up buying every single vote (say it is possible and that you have no "real" votes), it would cost 800,000,000 KD or about 3 Billion USD. I've gotta imagine that some Sheikh has that in his sleeve somewhere.
I've received the following article three times from three different people, so if I didn't post about it, I'd be lazy. Or rather - lazier.
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