..what do you think of vote-selling to highest bidders in an election?  

well this is a sad reality in our country. and our government is not watching and guarding against it, they are even tolerating it. It is like an acceptable tradition during election here in our country. And I even heard a story that some are brining carbon copy paper to verify who they are voting.. I for one is guilty of accepting money from political parties though I will not submit to their will I always choses the candidate I think deserves the position. I know that accepting it will just encourage corruption but then again if I will not accept that money it will just go to somebody else,and I also need some money.
The main reason for this is poverty. You can always accept the money due to necessity but it is important to always vote wisely, and a good start is not to vote the candidate who gives you the money and others who do the same.

first off this is very a corrupted way of doing an election that gives very few people a say on how the outcome will be. i live in the United States and something like this did happen. well it could had happened if the guy wasn't caught. it happened to be a governor of the state of Illinois at the time when they recorded him in secret phone conversations selling the Illinois Senate Seat to the highest bidder. The governor who did that at the time name was Rod Blagojevich. he ended up getting voted out of office after an impeachment trail.

Here in the United States our Supreme Court ruled that corporations can now spend any amount of money for campaigns. We are all expecting the less intelligent of us to be swayed by massive advertisements. They were bad before, but now I am dreading what is coming.

At least I don't have a television. I have the internet though, and most likely I'll have to sort out more fecal material this year.

I just had a nightmare. I go to movies, and now that they are showing advertisements at the movies -

I strongly believe that selling votes of any kind is wrong, because by doing so, then it is not a fair election. I believe the citizens of a given country should be able to have an honest say as to who their politicians are going to be elected to a given post of leadership.

i would easily sell my vote to the highest bidder. no questions asked. keep lotting.

The electoral process is a zero-sum game where somebody's victory is somebody else's loss. In this game, there is a group of individuals who have no strong political opinion nor interest in the outcome. In ideal conditions (i.e., fair elections), they do not gain anything whoever wins the contest. Who are they? The marginalized or unaffiliated voters. They are those who do not belong to any political party.

To condemn vote buying is an incomplete judgment of our political system. Vote buying in some form or another exists in every political system in the world. You just have to recognize how the payoff was made.

The vote buying activities we so easily deplore are the ones involving the poor and powerless. And I think it's unfair to impose a moral burden on them and suggest that they are somehow responsible for the state of our society.

I disagree with this judgment. The real problem in the Philippine society is our incapability of forming large organizations. This means social capital is low and trust is confined to our immediate families or circle of friends. Social scientist, Francis Fukuyama, studied the societies around the world and offered a good framework to help us understand what makes our own society weak.

My contributions to this discussion:
(1) Vote-buying is not the main problem.
(2) The Philippines is not more corrupt than other societies in the world.
(3) The source of our problems is not the self-interest nor weaknesses of our political leaders.