When Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad, deputy-head of the Kuwaiti Council of Ministers and the Kuwaiti Foreign Minister, was told that the votes were being sold, he committed himself to fighting the phenomenon. The story of candidates paying electors to vote a certain way is unique to Kuwait, to my knowledge at least. Perhaps it is due to the limited number of voters, who, since women cannot vote, don’t register more than 100,000. This makes it financially feasible to buy votes in Kuwait but impossible in a land of a billion people like India.

If democracy invented the concept of majority rule, through the vote, some Kuwaiti deputies have understood the concept in a totally different sense. In making their calculations, they found that buying 2,000 votes isn’t difficult in return for a two-year job in Parliament and the financial, political and social privileges it entails. That is unless Sheikh Saadoun’s estimates that a vote costs $10,000 are correct. I’ve heard from other sources though that it only costs around $1,000.

The practice of bribing voters is widespread during elections even in the big democracies, where they promise better standards of living with unparalleled generosity. Candidates race to offer the cheapest promises of salary raises, lower taxation and social services to the elderly, the sick and others. The important thing is the vote. After winning, candidates rarely if ever fulfill their promises because the government’s pockets cannot translate those promises into reality.

While Kuwaiti candidates may have thought it was discerning to just buy the electors’ votes rather than go hoarse trying to convince them, the Kuwaiti electorate itself is not that naive in its outlook on democracy. They get their promises even before casting a vote. In reality the task of cleaning the elections of money is a difficult one because it has gone on for so long that it has become a familiar scene in political life, like tipping waiters in coffee shops.

The vote-buying phenomenon also begins to look like just another feature of modern Arab culture. The Arab press, unique of its kind around the world, has a blatantly open market for buying and selling votes and points of view. Those in the media confer among themselves over who and how much — showing off what they see as an example of journalistic cunning.

Arab News Opinion 9 July 2003