Soup No. 5

How-to of Soup No. 5.

• Pass a provincial legislation to to make non-payment of Pilandok's vote a crime punishable by lifetime imprisonment for the offending candidate.
• Create a special office to oversee the peddling of votes, like the New York Stock Exchange, but with Islamic flavor.
• This new office under the Office of Muslim Affairs can be called, Lanao Islamic Vote Exchange (LIVE).
• LIVE will publish the daily voter’s “going rate” for each elective position.

Prices vary depending on voter’s blood relationship with the candidate, the amount of IRA-release for the office and day of purchase, i.e. generally expensive near election day. Insanely expensive on hotly-contested, special re-elections. Cheaper when the buying candidate is expected to withdraw to a sibling or close relative vying for the same position.

Mayor is more expensive than Governor, Governor is expensive than Congressman, and so on. This is the difficult part of the implementation. LIVE probably needs to hire Ernst & Young Consulting to conduct a 3 year study of the Ranao election and come up with a fair pricing policy.

• LIVE will administer candidate’s trust fund without interest (it’s un-Islamic to receive interest on your money).
• The Ulama "vote brokers" of LIVE will conduct Pilandok’s swearing on the Qur’an (that he will vote for the buying candidate or he goes to hell).

In these days of internet commerce, there’s no reason why we can’t do the entire transaction via the web, like using ebay or etrade.

Pilandok can log into a LIVE website, like http://www.pamasa-akong-ka.com, register and sell his vote. The money is credited directly to his registered checking account and the candidate’s trust fund is automatically debited.

Qur’an swearing can also be done on-line using finger print scanning technology and Qur'an multi-media version. LIVE has to install ATM-like kiosks to provide on-line services.

In order for this idea to really work, Pilandok should be able to sell his vote to all the candidates for the same position. Say, if there are 3 candidates for the City Mayor, Pilandok should be able to sell his vote to all 3 candidates.

This is a win-win situation. The candidate is happy that he gets to buy ALL the votes in his district and Pilandok is able to sell his vote to every candidate on the ballot box.

Watch the video. Arata Wata gotta get back to work.