HOW DESPERATE OUR PEOPLE ARE AT ELECTION TIME?

There are laws against importuning for votes.  Bribery at elections was at its height during the ancien regime in The Bahamas, when there was open voting.  Sir Henry Taylor, the late Governor General, writing in his book My Political Memoirs tells the story of the 1910 general election when candidates who had not been seen for seven years descended upon remote Long Island with sacks of flour and other goodies.  On election day, you would get one half of the flour before you voted, then you declared your vote and the candidate for whom you declared would deliver the second half of the flour.  All of that was supposedly banned by the time of the general election of 1949 but the practice is widely in use today in other forms.  Only this time, our leaders in the past having fought against the practice of election bribery and vote buying, would be turning in their graves as the sophisticated, political prostitution that goes on.  It is like the voters of the country have taken leave of their senses. People are walking up to the potential candidates, not concerned about their country and who will be the best to run it, but simply about who is going to give them something.  Some want lunch, some want liquor, some want a house, some want the roof fixed, some want the yard cleaned down next to them, some want a transfer out one government department to the next, some want to get a government job. In fact every unemployed person in the lower socio economic group wants to be a janitress or security at the schools or at Sandilands.  It is shameless.  The usual mantra is “I have six votes in my house and all of them are for you, if one of us gets a government job.”  This is an impossible situation.  There is no recognition of the public good.  It is all about money and what you can do for me now.  Just saying. One hopes that one day this will change but doesn’t look like any time soon.  The hurtful part is that they will still vote against you.