Selling votes in exchange of favours

While the incumbent Italian Prime Minister, Mario Monti, and representatives of the left, such as Massimo D’Alema, have openly accused the Italian former Prime Minister of buying votes, the Italian renowned journalist and writer, Roberto Saviano, explained for the Repubblica the scheme and how it works, something that for the Albanians sounds very familiar.

According to Saviano, this phenomenon was present in Southern Italy and now is affecting the north. It is a vote that kills democracy in exchange of a personal favour.

Saviano says that there are two types of vote manipulations: the criminal and the one that accelerates the bureaucratic rights that citizens are in fact entitled to have, but that often they cannot access due to the compromised institutional mechanisms. This makes political favours the only way to have your rights.

“This is very wrong, because in exchange of one single thing, you lose what democracy and politics should give. It might look like you are profiting one thing with your vote, but you are denying to yourself everything else that vote offers”, Saviano declared.

According to Saviano, the mechanism for doing this is giving a ballot with the name of the political candidate already checked. It is given to the voter, who keeps it hidden and who takes another empty ballot very normally, with his own passport. The voter then puts the checked ballot into the box, and brings back the empty one as evidence. This is then given to another voter.

After the voting is closed, there might be only two ballots that are lost, and that number is real, but those two could help buying thousands of votes. Saviano says that this makes Italians keep voting the same politicians, although in polls it shows they hate them more than other countries do.

Thank to these favours, the old politicians can be voted again. The problem is that the citizens, in exchange of a favour for the moment, will have to deal for years or maybe generations with the same politicians that make their life difficult.

According to Saviano, this mechanism can stop only if vote is perceived as something important for a change, and that makes you not wanting to sell it, not even to obtain a right that you’re entitled to have. Saviano declared that in 2010 they used the press to make OSCE aware of this fact, and that they took it seriously and offered help for a better vote monitoring. But to do this they needed a government request, which never happened.

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