Vendrah
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Actually, this is a support and advice thread that also involves a heavy philosophical political question, so this thread can belong to support and advice, politics section and philosophical too.
Ok, yesterday there was the election for mayor.
There were 12 candidates - 2 went to the 2nd round because the 1st candidate got less than 50% of valid votes.
Now, 2 candidates are left for the round two - one is theoretically from the left and the other is aligned with the far-right with Bolsonaro (far right wing president) 'support'. However, it is imminent that both are corrupt.
You can't have a proper distinction from the other side, though. If the sum of all incomes plus heritage is significantly or waayyy higher than the declaration of goods, you cannot deduct that there is fraud, you can deduct that either the candidate had lost a significant amount of money or that the candidate is hiding goods - it is a common pattern in Brazil to corrupt people to declare less amount of goods to cover some sort of fraud - scams related to cheat taxes (by pretending something doesn't exist or into creating very high underestimations of its value to reduce the calculated tax) or 'washed' money/goods (the good indirectly comes from illegal scams, like drugs or money that comes from a public ordinance and goes to the politician pockets instead, but needs to be covered because it is recognized by property law to belong to the politician yet it does not belong to any income stream). There are some figures here (3-4 for this mayor election) that are 'homeless with expensive suits' ('mendigo de terno'), that declared that they have absolutely nothing - yet they are candidates!
What happened to the mayors in the 2nd round of my city is that both of the politicians that comes to the 2nd round declared that their amount of goods is less than their yearly income (using lower estimations) yet their income is active for decades, literally. Just a random example that, think of a person who yearns $60.000 yearly for 30 years and says that her/his amount of goods is declared to be worth a total of $40.000 - WTF happened to the rest of the money? It either mysteriously disappeared - it is probably hidden to get mixed to illegal money - or the person was actually irresponsible enough to lose it to a bet or to induce some accident event with guilt (like, I don't know, putting fire to someone's house and having to pay a new house? Ok, this is exaggeration, but think of a major event like that), or there was a massive donation. Anyway, all these events, except the donation, is really an argument for why that person should NOT be a mayor - lack of responsibility or the person can't even manage their own money (so imagine the disaster that would be them managing a city budget). However, we can google search for the candidates to see if we spot any major event that had caused that, even though massive donation is actually a known method do do money laundry - a method to hide money - so not all of them who officially donated the money actually did it.
But that comes from inductive reasoning - so, although it is imminent that these candidates are up to something, and I could not find any major event that justifies the massive donation without being worth of taking this suspicion out, also considering that the politicians here are usually corrupt (or at least perceived so - Corruption Perception Index of Brazil has a high perception of corruption) - I can't really say that about them, yet I do take both as likely/imminently corrupt (because they are hiding money, and they are hiding money because their yearly income is higher than the amount of goods declared by them plus they work for decades). But these are my two options. I can do two things:
- Vote in one of them knowing that I am giving votes to a corrupted politician, which sort of makes me feel bad and guilty when they started cheating while I gave them a vote.
- Or vote in none, which means that the other votes are going to decide which one instead.
I know I am not actually guilty of this situation. If most people were like me, none of them would make it, regardless of them being on the opposite spectrums of right and left. Most of people here, including some people from my family, did vote and does not know how many candidates for mayors existed this year if I ever ask them. They just voted on the candidate that was praised the most on Whatsapp (or the ones Bolsonaro supports, there is some overlap).
I did the latter option for the presidency 2 years ago (voted on none - you basically put a number that does not exist or press the letter 'white', which sort of should be called 'transparent' instead). Although my criteria was different (both of them passed on this criteria), I attributed both the left candidate and far right wing Bolsonaro as candidates with highly suspicion of corruption - the suspicion for corruption was actually more towards the left candidate while Bolsonaro seemed fascist and a little bit exaggerated and absurd - no, wait, actually Bolsonaro did a declaration which implies that he cheated taxes at least one time. But I don't know if I should voted on the other one that opposed to Bolsonaro even if I did perceived him as corrupted just because his proposal and priorities seemed more appropriated than Bolsonaro for the current situation of the country. So I did voted on none - but some anti-Bolsonaro people blame people like me because actually like 20-35% of the country did the same and if we all voted against Bolsonaro the other candidate would have won (not by a big margin, but would), so people from extreme left says we are guilty of it (Bolsonaro being president) too - even though most of us had voted for a candidate in the first round (we had 10-15 options at the time), but our candidate didn't make it (and nor other candidates that seemed reasonable and not corrupt), although some few people admit they are ignorant or don't care and instead vote white or a random meaningless number every election - I think it is great that ignorant people absents themselves from voting, that is indeed better for the nation.
So, what do you think I should do next time, vote on the corrupted one I think has the best proposals, try to speculate which one is the least corrupted, just make a 'right vs left' test and vote the one that is closer to my right vs left position (which would put me to vote on the less extremist one) or what? This is not personal but is quite of a dilemma.
Ok, yesterday there was the election for mayor.
There were 12 candidates - 2 went to the 2nd round because the 1st candidate got less than 50% of valid votes.
Now, 2 candidates are left for the round two - one is theoretically from the left and the other is aligned with the far-right with Bolsonaro (far right wing president) 'support'. However, it is imminent that both are corrupt.
Well, here we got something called 'declaração de bens', which translate as 'declaration of goods', which is a declaration of property - the candidate does declare which are their property. I think this was partially created to make the job of the people on the justice department to find which politicians are the best 'targets' to investigate, but also to people like me to spot those who either have lots of things to hide or have a very high amount of money without having proper activities to have so. The latter are almost in extinction, because you can deduct that there is fraud when the sum of all incomes of the politician (plus heritage) is significantly lower than the amount of declared goods.Someone said:
You can't have a proper distinction from the other side, though. If the sum of all incomes plus heritage is significantly or waayyy higher than the declaration of goods, you cannot deduct that there is fraud, you can deduct that either the candidate had lost a significant amount of money or that the candidate is hiding goods - it is a common pattern in Brazil to corrupt people to declare less amount of goods to cover some sort of fraud - scams related to cheat taxes (by pretending something doesn't exist or into creating very high underestimations of its value to reduce the calculated tax) or 'washed' money/goods (the good indirectly comes from illegal scams, like drugs or money that comes from a public ordinance and goes to the politician pockets instead, but needs to be covered because it is recognized by property law to belong to the politician yet it does not belong to any income stream). There are some figures here (3-4 for this mayor election) that are 'homeless with expensive suits' ('mendigo de terno'), that declared that they have absolutely nothing - yet they are candidates!
What happened to the mayors in the 2nd round of my city is that both of the politicians that comes to the 2nd round declared that their amount of goods is less than their yearly income (using lower estimations) yet their income is active for decades, literally. Just a random example that, think of a person who yearns $60.000 yearly for 30 years and says that her/his amount of goods is declared to be worth a total of $40.000 - WTF happened to the rest of the money? It either mysteriously disappeared - it is probably hidden to get mixed to illegal money - or the person was actually irresponsible enough to lose it to a bet or to induce some accident event with guilt (like, I don't know, putting fire to someone's house and having to pay a new house? Ok, this is exaggeration, but think of a major event like that), or there was a massive donation. Anyway, all these events, except the donation, is really an argument for why that person should NOT be a mayor - lack of responsibility or the person can't even manage their own money (so imagine the disaster that would be them managing a city budget). However, we can google search for the candidates to see if we spot any major event that had caused that, even though massive donation is actually a known method do do money laundry - a method to hide money - so not all of them who officially donated the money actually did it.
But that comes from inductive reasoning - so, although it is imminent that these candidates are up to something, and I could not find any major event that justifies the massive donation without being worth of taking this suspicion out, also considering that the politicians here are usually corrupt (or at least perceived so - Corruption Perception Index of Brazil has a high perception of corruption) - I can't really say that about them, yet I do take both as likely/imminently corrupt (because they are hiding money, and they are hiding money because their yearly income is higher than the amount of goods declared by them plus they work for decades). But these are my two options. I can do two things:
- Vote in one of them knowing that I am giving votes to a corrupted politician, which sort of makes me feel bad and guilty when they started cheating while I gave them a vote.
- Or vote in none, which means that the other votes are going to decide which one instead.
I know I am not actually guilty of this situation. If most people were like me, none of them would make it, regardless of them being on the opposite spectrums of right and left. Most of people here, including some people from my family, did vote and does not know how many candidates for mayors existed this year if I ever ask them. They just voted on the candidate that was praised the most on Whatsapp (or the ones Bolsonaro supports, there is some overlap).
I did the latter option for the presidency 2 years ago (voted on none - you basically put a number that does not exist or press the letter 'white', which sort of should be called 'transparent' instead). Although my criteria was different (both of them passed on this criteria), I attributed both the left candidate and far right wing Bolsonaro as candidates with highly suspicion of corruption - the suspicion for corruption was actually more towards the left candidate while Bolsonaro seemed fascist and a little bit exaggerated and absurd - no, wait, actually Bolsonaro did a declaration which implies that he cheated taxes at least one time. But I don't know if I should voted on the other one that opposed to Bolsonaro even if I did perceived him as corrupted just because his proposal and priorities seemed more appropriated than Bolsonaro for the current situation of the country. So I did voted on none - but some anti-Bolsonaro people blame people like me because actually like 20-35% of the country did the same and if we all voted against Bolsonaro the other candidate would have won (not by a big margin, but would), so people from extreme left says we are guilty of it (Bolsonaro being president) too - even though most of us had voted for a candidate in the first round (we had 10-15 options at the time), but our candidate didn't make it (and nor other candidates that seemed reasonable and not corrupt), although some few people admit they are ignorant or don't care and instead vote white or a random meaningless number every election - I think it is great that ignorant people absents themselves from voting, that is indeed better for the nation.
So, what do you think I should do next time, vote on the corrupted one I think has the best proposals, try to speculate which one is the least corrupted, just make a 'right vs left' test and vote the one that is closer to my right vs left position (which would put me to vote on the less extremist one) or what? This is not personal but is quite of a dilemma.
