Brazil is much, much worse off than the US. There the corruption goes all the way to the lowest levels of government. In the US local politicians don't pay a couple of bucks to a thousand dirt poor voters to vote in the county elections so they can win. In Brazil this happens everywhere.
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It is very usual to buy votes in USA:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/selling...
"The price of one bona fide, registered American vote varies from place to place. But it is rarely more than a tank of gas."
A good book that descibes it is "Washington, D.C: A Novel (Narratives of Empire)." of Gore Vidal.
Did you read your own article? It says: "Voter fraud, by any method, is still rare. A study by News21 — a consortium of journalism schools — found 867 cases since 2000 in which someone had admitted guilt or been convicted of a voter-fraud offense. That was out of about 146 million registered voters."
The headline is super misleading, the point of the article is that selling votes is more common than outright impersonation or other forms of voting fraud.
In Brazil, voting is compulsory. All those people are going to be voting anyway
That's the problem, it costs us a lot more than a few bucks.
Billions and billions in spending or the US Senator will not vote the bill, or block it. F-35 is made in 45 states, only because all Senators and Congressmen want to buy votes (indirectly) http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/08/the-pentagons-399-billio...
In Brazil they do it the honest way.
We have that problem too, a lot of the corruption (I'd say most but I don't have data) is to gather money to be used by the political parties on their campaigns, propaganda, etc. Buying voters with literal cash works with people that are very poor and mostly alienated by the government.
As voting is compulsory in Brazil, a lot of people vote on the person that appeared on the television, or the person that had pamphlets being distributed at the red lights, so spending money on campaign works, indirectly buying votes.
Untrue. I've lived in Arizona for a year; have you heard of sheriff Joe Arpaio?
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/criminal-enterprise-a-cu...
One could say the US is just as corrupt, or more, than Brazil.
Characters like Arpaio are relatively uncommon in lower levels of the US gov. Corruption in Brazil is endemic. Pretty sure theres a large difference.
US may occasionally see third-world-BS, but in many places elsewhere in the world it is a fact of life.
One could, but it would be a statement completely divorced from reality.
How so? I can cite a single corruption episode that trumps maybe 99% of the Brazilian corruption scandals.
40 billion USD in cash sent to Afghanistan by plane just "vanished". https://www.cnbc.com/id/45031100
For the sake of comparison, the largest corruption scandal of Brazil to this date revolves around 42 billion BRL, which is about 13 billion USD. http://g1.globo.com/pr/parana/noticia/2015/11/pf-estima-que-...
Of course, one might argue "oh, but 40 bilion dollars in cash going missing is not corruption, it's just unfortunate/bad management/insert excuse here". "Corruption" is just one of those words of which the meaning changes depending on the object it refers to - it's always the other person's, never your own.
As the nephew of a former mayor of a small town of about 5k people in Brazil, I heard most people who get into office here can't possibly make back in salary all the money they spent buying votes before the election so the system itself usually removes the least corrupt candidates automatically.