‘Democracy, poverty and vote-buying’

Dec 22, 2025 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Vote-buying is the offer of financial or other material inducements to voters by candidates or political parties during an election campaign period and/or on election day in exchange for electoral support. It can also be categorised as an abuse of state resources: the misuse of government resources, whether material, human, coercive, regulatory, budgetary, media-related or legislative, for electoral advantage.’

According to the International IDEA, vote-buying originated with competitive electoral systems. It undermines the integrity of elections, is detrimental to democratic governance and is an electoral campaign violation in over 90% of countries. Immediately before the 2025 elections, the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), perhaps with some prodding from the official opposition who were making noises about massive vote buying, reminded stakeholders that they have a moral and legal duty to contribute to the elections being conducted in a free, fair manner. By the Representation of the People Act, it is an offence for any person, directly or indirectly, to offer any money, gift, and/or a loan, to any voter to secure the vote.

Vote-buying is said to be the ‘modern cancer of democracy’ that persists largely because of the absence of political will on the part of governments, political parties and the elections oversight bodies to establish and comply with modern legislation. This has certainly been the case in Guyana, where since colonial times all aspects of vote buying have existed and persisted since not long after ‘the return to democracy’ in 1992.

The practise may be either ‘positive, where it seeks to encourage people to turn out and vote for a given candidate/party, or ‘negative’, where it rewards voters who refrain from participating in the elections. Most Guyanese are aware and may even have participated in the former, but ‘agents campaigning for the ruling party -The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) – in the 1997 election bought voter identification cards of the opposition’s supporters’ to prevent them from voting (What is Vote Buying? Empirical Evidence, Frederic Charles Schaffer, Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology 2002).

Governments, none more so than the PPP during the last elections, routinely use the public purse to buy votes and this is precisely what it sought to do, when according to the Kaieteur News, President Irfaan Ali ‘hinted’ that should his party win the elections the population would be given one of its usual arbitrary cash grants for the Christmas holidays. He is reported to have reenforced this ‘hint’ with the following tomfoolery: ‘We will have a beautiful Christmas. Look at the smile on my face and know that you will have an enjoyable holiday!’ (KN; 18/12/2925).

It is argued that voters’ willingness to accept benefits in exchange for their vote is principally a consequence of poverty and social exclusion.  This column has repeatedly argued that for decades the PPP has been focused on economically marginalising and impoverishing Guyanese of African ethnicity to win their votes. Largely because of this type of historical and insidious discrimination against Africans, the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent General Assembly called upon all countries in which Africans reside to regularly provide disaggregated ethnic data, but in Guyana even the normal periodic population census is unavailable.

A general consequence of the above is that while Guyana is classified as one of the fastest growing economies in the world it still has a poverty rate that is apparently growing and is greater than any of the larger English-speaking Caribbean Community countries. Elections based upon this kind of behaviour cannot be free and fair much less democratic.

The president must be aware that it is morally wrong to set out to fool the entire voting population and be caught doing so. This kind of disrespectful behaviour can only happen or be explained as a joke with minimal consequences when governments are unaccountable. In any case, I do not buy the cash flow explanation from a regime known for finding financing when it wants to.

It is more likely that after its reckless spending and questionable performance made it impossible for the last elections to be considered democratic, it took heed and/or was advised that among other things, the unilateral payouts to buy votes that the president has become accustomed to is not democratic budgeting. For reference, his next-door neighbour, Suriname, has what constitutes more acceptable forms of both budgeting and sustainably predicable cash grants.

Yuletide is as good a time as any for us to briefly consider the future and the relationship between the many social and economic factors that have contributed to vote buying. Firstly, many persons, even those living in what could be considered liberal democracies, view the entire content of ‘democracy’ as ‘majority rule,’ i.e., the most equitable, peaceful and effective means of managing society.  Even with this limited understanding, contemporary social pressure has forced autocrats to hold national elections, but they want us to believe that governments should be essentially judged by the amount of material outcomes they provide, i.e., sufficient food, infrastructure, leisure, etc, and equitable participation in determining who rules is of secondary importance. Thus, in the autocratic setting there are always relatively substantial policing arrangements to force compliance.

Of course, while a liberal representative democracy is an equitable means of determining who rules and indirectly drives the provision of society’s material requirements, it is more importantly an expression of human freedom in the social setting. Without it wants become the dominant factor, inequalities abound, the natural environment is ravaged, and human freedom is perennially and universally curtailed.

When one seeks to buy or sell votes one not only encourages unaccountable/dictatorial governance such as we at present have in Guyana, but severely diminishes one’s capacity to equitably contribute to the appropriate development and appreciation of the world in which one lives and for which, your fore-parents, not even appreciating the gravamen of their actions, fought and died.

Season’s greetings.

Regards,
Dr. Henry Jeffrey

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• Democracy, Henry Jeffrey, Letters, poverty, vote buying

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