Sunday, October 01, 2006

Election day in Brazil

Today is election day, and we will all be happy to see the campaign end. All of the polls are predicting the ever-corrupt populist, Lula, to win re-election here. The scandals that have broken during this election would have sent any North American politician running for cover (even in this day and age) but here it only gets a small percentage of the population worked up. Frankly I'm amazed that the country operates as smoothly as it does considering the political crooks who run this country. I guess it shows how hard the average Brazilian works to make ends meet.

We wanted to show you how politicians get the word out. These pictures show some of the more popular methods: banners and wall signage. What absolutely blew us away was that here in Brazil people routinely tear down political signage (making a huge mess) or worse, they will paint over someone's political ad and put their own ad on top of it. You would never get away with that on PEI. (They freak out if you touch someone's lawn sign!) The numbers are important for voting. Instead of having names written on ballots and allowing the voter to check the one he wantsto vote for, the voter has to type in the number of each candidate they want. This is beacuse there are so many political parties here that the ballots would be several pages long and far too complicated to put the names on them. Besides, nearly 40% of Brazilians can't read anyway.

There have been many political rallies at a preshool building on our street only about 200 meters from our house. It has made the election seem a little closer to us as non-voters.

All Brazilians are required to vote. Forced democracy sounds good on paper, but it's really just mob rule. And here in South America it has become a time of promises to the numerous poor so that the poiticians will get their vote, but then they break those promises as soon as they get elected. All in all, it's a very poor way to run a country, if you ask us.