The state of Arizona in the US has passed a law which will allow it to try a new method of getting people to vote on polling day. Each general election (till Arizona comes to its senses) one voter will be awarded a million dollars, just for turning up and voting.
It seems people are up in arms about it, but really, what difference can it make? It’s not like the US is very democratic anyway, why shouldn’t people have the chance to win something after going to all that effort to turn off the tv, get off the couch and head all the way over to their nearest polling booth and casting a vote. Gosh, maybe everyone should get a prize. They could institute lucky door prizes and prizes for voter number x and what about a prize for the person who manages to vote the most times in one election? Oh, wait, that’s illegal. As, apparently, is Arizona’s new idea:
One federal statute calls for fines or imprisonment of up to one year to anyone who “makes or offers to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote, or to vote for or against any candidate; and whoever solicits, accepts, or receives any such expenditure in consideration of his vote or the withholding of his vote.”
“It’s clearly illegal,” said Jack Chin, a professor at the University of Arizona law school who has studied voting rights issues.
Illegal or not, what kind of message does it send to the various US democracy projects around the world? Perhaps voters in Iraq and Afghanistan should ask the US military for prizes for their next elections. “Living to see another day”, “immunity from racial profiling” and “free passage through road blocks for a month” would all be popular choices I’d imagine.
All jokes aside:
“Bribing people to vote is a superficial approach that will have no beneficial outcome to the process, except to make some people feel good that the turnout numbers are higher,” said an editorial in The Yuma Sun. “But higher numbers do not necessarily mean a better outcome.”
When all’s said and done I think the initiative will achieve nothing other than to further tarnish the once-shining image of America – that bastion of freedom and democracy and leader of the free world.
Oh, and it turns out you still have a better chance of dying from a lightning strike in Arizona (at 1 in 55,928) than winning the voter lottery. I wonder what the chances are in Washington…
Read all about in today's New York Times. The picture is from NY Times too.
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