"According to the report, a survey of 3,000 students conducted by an NYU undergraduate journalism class found that an overwhelming majority of those polled said their right to vote could be for sale; in addition to the 66 percent who said they'd trade their vote for a free year of college, 20 percent said they'd exchange their vote for an Ipod Touch. Half of the students polled said they'd forfeit their right to vote forever for $1 million.
Dalton Conley, chairman of NYU's sociology department, told Politico.com that the results are actually encouraging. The high price tag most students put on their vote showed that they actually think the right to vote is very valuable and important."
Despite the iffy news source (you can see I don't think much of fox news), the question posed inspired me to ask myself the same question. What would it take for me to sit out the next election? The answer (not surprisingly) is not very much. The reason I come to that conclusion is that the chances of me voting at all in the election is terribly low - in the last 25 years of my life, my mother has gotten the chance to vote exactly ONCE, considering I live in the walkover Bukit Timah district. Even if I did get the chance to vote in the next election, the chances I would have a choice of candidates to vote for are incredibly slim and the outcome incredibly sad i.e. there is a 99% chance there won't be any good opposition and a 99.9% chance the guys in white would win anyway and my vote would be a token protest vote.
The sad thing is I think that transaction has already been enforced on me wil say or nil say not mattering much in this equation. "The Western media wants Singapore to 'listen to them' -- to introduce more democracy and public protests." Sounds familiar? That's what our very own LKY said last week. The rheotheric has always been that individual freedom is a "western" concept, not an "asian" one. The implication being that as asians if we give up individual freedoms, collective wealth and economic growth will come. Not that I am denying that Singapore has gained great leaps and bounds over the last decades but sometimes I wonder if we had to have given up one to have gotten the other. In other words, this is like the enbloc sale of a flat - because 80% of you want the cash return, the other 20% of you must be happy to give up your home of 40 years sentimental value or not and not complain.
That being said, while I say that my vote price for not voting in the next election (a near surety anyway) is relatively low, my price for voting one way or another is much higher and in the faint hope that things somehow change (or that I move to Hougang or Potong Pasir), I don't think I'll be giving up my right to vote for life anytime soon.
