Expectations for Violations during the Election Campaign
Expectations for Violations during the Election Campaign
From being an isolated, sporadic event, vote buying has turned into a rather widely spread practice over the last 4-5 years. Only a month before the Bulgarian parliamentary elections 2009 and just a few days before the European, the alerts for electoral violations have become more frequent. The public at large expects that these occurrences will intensify in the period right before the national vote, from which the battle is more fierce and the stake – higher.
Precisely due to their wide-spread the level of sensitivity towards these incidences has significantly diminished in Bulgarians’ minds – a total of 44% of the people consider it acceptable for a person to vote for a given party, in case a party representative offers him or her material or other kinds of remuneration. Each of the different kinds of election “stimulation” is approved by about a third of Bulgarians.
These practices have influenced the most negatively the younger generations, who are more ready than the other people to consider acceptable the different forms of material stimulations. Every second person in the age group 18-30 does not see any problem in people “selling they vote” if they are promised money, new position, or social benefits.
The supporters of the different political parties are relatively evenly affected by this process. Exceptions make RZS and Ataka, among which the share of supporters perceiving it normal to receive material gains in exchange for one’s vote is considerably higher than the average (about 35-40%).
Besides being a direct violation to the election rules, vote buying and selling leads to one even more destructive consequence – undermining the criteria what is lawful and moral and what is not. Thus, by establishing the practice of buying or falsifying votes, the politicians risk to steadily “skew” Bulgarians’ value system and to endorse a society without moral principles. There are not so many voters who realize that having entered in the power by such means, politicians would not fail to take advantage of their positions; because if politics is perceived a domain “worth” of votes buying, then there are also expectations for high returns.
Whether the legal requirement, that every propagating material should contain information that buying and selling votes is a crime, would discontinue this practice depends to a large extent to voters’ “threshold of sensitivity,” which, as shown in the survey, is set rather high. Bulgarian voters tend to perceive acceptable many of the popular forms of votes buying.
When ethics cannot fulfill its role, institutions step in. The more effective they are in sanctioning votes’ buying and selling, the more possible it would be to discontinue pre-election trading.
