"Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy"

[Donkees]

How much is your vote worth? If somebody working for a political campaign knocked on your door and offered you something for your vote in an upcoming election, what would you negotiate? According to Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, there are parts of Louisiana where a person's vote has been sold for $5 and a pork chop sandwich. Sometimes, she writes, a campaign might throw in a cold drink as lagniappe.

In "Five Dollars and a Pork Chop Sandwich: Vote Buying and the Corruption of Democracy," Berry makes what may sound on its face like a counterintuitive argument. Paying people a few dollars to vote is, as she puts it, "voter suppression on the cheap."

How's that?

When you give people a few dollars for their vote, she said in a Monday morning interview in Faubourg Marigny, you are siphoning off any pressure they might make for meaningful political change. If those who sold their votes did muster the temerity to complain, the politicians whose campaign dollars funded their gifts could honestly say that they'd already helped them. If vote-buying impedes any meaningful political change, then vote-buying is its own kind of voter suppression.

As for voter fraud, Berry said the country's problem isn't people showing up to the polls pretending to be somebody else. The problem, Berry said, is campaigns taking filled-out absentee ballots to nursing homes and senior-citizen centers and then turning them in when they're signed.

Consider Red River Parish. That parish had an election for sheriff in 2000. Greg Malveaux, who investigated election fraud for what was then the state election commissioner's office, raised his eyebrows at an unusual request for 121 absentee ballots. The request was made by the assistant manager of a housing project in the parish. That assistant manager also turned in the completed ballots.

When campaigns are using the absentee ballot as their vehicle for corruption, Berry said Monday, "they actually fill it out for you. You don't have to fill it out yourself."

Berry said she approached the subject of vote-buying in the United States with disdain for those who are exchanging their votes for small bills and snacks. Then, she stopped herself and said, "These are poor people. They have enough trouble."

Though she doesn't approve of vote-buying, she understands why poor folks would agree to vote-selling. Experience has taught them, she said, that the politicians seeking election are not going to fix their streets and roads, are not going to improve the schools, are not going to bring in jobs, are not going to fulfill any of the lofty promises that they make on the campaign trail. So if they can't get anything big, "At least I know I'll get my five dollars and a pork chop sandwich and a cold drink."

In addition to assuming that she'd be writing about vote-sellers as the villains, when Berry started her research, she also assumed that she'd find that Louisiana is an especially bad place for that kind of corruption. But these kind of "shenanigans" (she used that word a lot) happen all over the country, she said.




And one of the reasons this happens all over the country she said, is that all across the country, local prosecutors are elected. Local prosecutors ought to investigate allegations of voting-buying, she said. But some of them have likely used the same techniques to win their own elections and, therefore, aren't inclined to disrupt the corruption.

Two Democratic congressmen – Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Keith Ellison of Minnesota – have proposed adding the right to vote to the U.S. Constitution, which would make voting fraud a federal crime. But amendments to the Constitution are deliberately and notoriously difficult to add.

Greater enforcement of voting laws would be helpful. So would incentivizing voting. Australians, she writes, "make the polling place a venue where neighbors meet and socialize and enjoy beer while engaged in voting, instead of just a location where they exercise the formality of casting a ballot as quickly as possible." Here some private companies – she mentions Starbucks, Krispy Kreme and Chick-fil-A – have treated customers with "I Voted" stickers.

Australia also makes the failure to vote punishable by a fine, but Berry rejects compulsory voting as right for the United States. Such a law, she said, "would make the same people vote, and they wouldn't even get $5 and a pork chop sandwich."

http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2016/02/vote_buying_louisiana.html